They represent the most elite UK casualties so far in a crisis that could yet see off the current prime minister and threaten the monarchy itself. The precipitating factor has been the whiff of financial, rather than sexual, misdeeds – very serious allegations, actually, that could be said, if true, to have treasonably betrayed state secrets, costing us all money that should have gone towards the nation’s health, education, etc. If so, off with their heads!

But important as these investigations may be, they are of course just an incidental consequence of the all-consuming Epstein saga, which, in its sexual dimension, looks so ridiculously overblown and beyond rational debate that we may feel all we can do is dismiss it with a fatalist shrug. That is the temptation given that Jeffrey Epstein himself, the allegedly monstrous “convicted paedophile”, was never known to have had sexual relations with any preteens or even wanted to. Nor is it a criminal offence to be a paedophile.

The seemingly wilful imperviousness of the politico-media classes to such realities is not encouraging. By charging ahead regardless, they change what words mean. They change reality. Let’s not split pubic hairs, they insist. “Grooming”, or “procuring”, or “trafficking” of younger women under about 25 (or is it 35? Or more?) is definitely paedophilia, and it is creepy even to question that. And just being a paedophile is an offence, because it is perceived as offensive.

Our role as MAPs in this vast, hegemonic onslaught of body-negative discourse is marginal to the point of invisibility at the moment. Nevertheless, it makes sense to assess where we stand, in order to adapt and survive. It affects us all, not just the elite figures named in the so-called “Epstein files”, anxiously awaiting further disclosures as these presidents, princes, billionaires and globally famed intellectuals may be.

We need to understand, first of all, that the millions of files in question are just a ragbag that includes all manner of uncorroborated tittle tattle reported to the authorities and kept on file. And all sorts of correspondence that had nothing to do with sexual scandal, including an email from retired classics professor Thomas Hubbard to the Epstein Foundation appealing for funds (which were not forthcoming) for a scholarly institution he heads, the William A Percy Foundation. That email recently appeared in hostile press coverage insinuating an illicit connection with the man himself.

His response is instructive. Instead of joining the unseemly rush to monster Epstein and trot out the nauseating mantra “my thoughts are with the victims”, Tom came out fighting, putting out a feisty press statement saying he knew of no evidence that any of Epstein’s contacts had been non-consensual at the time.

Some, he said, were “self-conscious sex workers who recruited others into his orbit and are now making cynical claims of victimization to cash in on his estate and business partners”. He added: “Like over 1,000,000 Americans, he did have a conviction for a sex-related offense, but from what I could see in 2015, it was for something that would not even have been illegal in most European countries…”

I have known and admired Tom a long time, partly thanks to my own work some years ago as a research assistant with the late historian Bill Percy, after whom the William A Percy Foundation was named. There have been Heretic TOC blogs carrying Bill’s obituary and several pieces on Tom’s doughty challenges to the follies of our age. One of his more notable contributions was his book Censoring Sex Research: The Debate over Male Intergenerational Relations (Routledge, 2013).

To Tom’s defence of Epstein, I would add that even within the so-called victim accounts we see another story struggling to get out. Epstein was quite possibly the nice guy many friends thought he was, and pleasant to his undoubtedly numerous young lady friends, as I wrote in Epstein: am I missing something? It is remarkable that one so-called “survivor”, Juliette Bryant was sending him chatty, affectionate emails years after her alleged “horrific” abuse as can be seen here on Jmail, where Epstein’s emails can be seen as he would have done.

Yet Bryant sensationally told Chris Hansen (of To Catch a Predator notoriety) in a YouTube interview about a month ago that this abuse had included medical experiments performed on her at Epstein’s ranch in New Mexico. Bullshit! Even her performative distress on this video clip looks fake.

But that hasn’t stopped other claims about goings on at the ranch – girls strangled and buried in the grounds, sulphuric acid used to dissolve bodies, babies sacrificed – being taken so seriously by the local authorities that a multi-million dollar enquiry has been launched. Bonkers!

One email from 2019 in the Epstein files offers to supply – for a price – video evidence of Epstein raping children. An obvious scam, it says you will get the evidence once you pay one Bitcoin for it, which on the date in question would have been worth around $7,500. Nice little earner, even then! As for the serial lies told by the most high-profile allegator, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, no need to reprise them here. Just check out Michael Tracey’s excellent take-down journalism.

I’ll just throw in a “fun fact”, as he called it, from one his tweets:

Annie Farmer received $1.5 million for claiming she was a “survivor” of “hand-holding.” Literally. When she testified in the Maxwell trial, the judge was compelled to instruct jurors that she hadn’t been subjected to any “illegal sexual activity”.

Now that’s a not-so-little nice earner! And Giuffre’s equally baseless claims against the then Prince Andrew were a much bigger one. As Ben Gunn points out in Quillette (thank you, Warbling J Turpitude, for alerting me to this article) she had all the time in the world to file a criminal complaint but didn’t. Instead, she accepted a financial settlement, all the while declaring it wasn’t about the money.

I started by saying we could just shrug off this nonsense but that it makes sense to get a handle on it. Among the more insightful commentators who have attempted to capture the zeitgeist in this regard are Richard Hanania, Brendan O’Neill, and, finally, a writer as quirky and intriguing as his name, Thomas Peermohamed Lambert.

Hanania’s work has already been commended by others here in the Comments, so I won’t dwell on it other than to mention this recent piece. Some may find it rather elitist in its dismissal of conspiracy theories coming from less well off, often poorly educated people with what he calls “low human capital”, and why they obsess over paedophilia. But he has a strong point: “losers”, he says, feel the need to look down on someone else.

Like Hanania, O’Neill examines why the Epstein saga has become such a big deal, and how conspiracy theories about it have converged towards agreement between Left and Right, for different reasons. In O’Neill’s case, he homes in on one very specific aspect of the phenomenon: Epstein’s Jewishness , and its importance for conspiracy theorists.

On the anti-Zionist Left, it has been claimed Epstein was a Mossad agent, plotting against the Palestinians through his friendship with leading Israelis such as former prime minster Ehud Barak. But that is a weird claim. As O’Neill points out, in recent years Barak has sided with the the anti-Zionist radical Left. I might add that Epstein was also a big fan and friend of Noam Chomsky, one of the world’s most prominent and longstanding critics of Israeli governments, notably as regards the “atrocities” (his word, although I concur) committed against the Palestinians long before the also atrocious rampage by Hamas on 7 October 2023.

On the racist Right, Epstein’s alleged misdeeds have been used as an excuse for attacks on “the Jews” as the source of all evil. Go onto X, he says, and you will see, “It’s all there. Jews control world affairs. They are the puppet-masters of the powerful. They use sexual corruption and blackmail to dominate governments.” But the truth is, he adds, that the FBI has found not so much a sliver of evidence that Epstein was blackmailing powerful men with surreptitiously filmed clips of them abusing girls.

An extensive search of his homes, his emails and his bank accounts turned up nothing to suggest he was engaged in sex-linked extortion with the rich and powerful. Yet they’re all over social media claiming the files prove the super-rich kill children and eat their flesh. They have revived the Jew hatred of the 1200s, “giving rise to unhinged cries about how that most warped people have a cannibalistic urge to sacrifice the innocent. The blood libel reborn.”

Which brings me to our third writer, Thomas Peermohamed Lambert, he of the oddly hybrid forenames, one Christian in origin, one Muslim. A young and highly acclaimed debut novelist last year, his contribution is so colourful it might smack of fiction but is actually grounded in serious anthropology – a combination of attributes that is both irresistibly fascinating and devilishly dangerous.

Lambert’s schtick is to draw a comparison between Epstein’s elite circle of friends, with their secretive gatherings in remote locations such as a private island and a desert ranch, and numerous completely separate and independent tribal secret brotherhoods dotted around the globe, first studied by the anthropologist Franz Boas over a hundred years ago, to which only a privileged elite could belong. A distinguishing characteristic was that membership involved bizarre rituals.

Up to this point we might just be talking about the tribal equivalent of the Freemasons, which go back many centuries but which nevertheless belong to modern “civilisation” rather than older, prehistoric cultures. What Boas discovered, in the Pacific Northwest region of America, with Percy Amaury Talbot and other anthropologists later making similar findings in Africa and elsewhere, was alarmingly different. Their rituals were not just bizarre, they were grotesque. These were cannibal cultures. In Liberia and Sierra Leone, notably, “the secretive Poro society wormed its way into just about every important political position with initiates sacrificing their own first-born sons to reach the highest ranks”.

By 1950, similar cults had been found on every continent, albeit their actual rites and secrets had little in common. What all human societies seemed to require, rather, was an excuse for secrecy itself. But why?

The next breakthrough, according to Lambert, came in the 1990s, when archaeologists in France and Italy began to notice indications of cannibalistic human sacrifice in Palaeolithic cave dwellings. These cannibal cults invariably seemed to emerge in “transegalitarian” societies – those who were caught somewhere between flat, egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands and stratified, feudal societies with established hereditary classes.

Could we be in a comparable period of uncertain, volatile, alarming, transition today? In an important sense, says Lambert, the Epstein revelations are simply the latest chapter in the ancient history of secret societies designed to enforce boundaries between a cosy elite and a terrified rank and file. But, he says:

…it is the more feverish rumours, like the cannibalistic orgies in the upstairs rooms of pizza restaurants posited by QAnon, that are most telling of Epstein’s sociological significance. Suddenly, spontaneously, people with no familiarity with the Hamatsa, the Ekkpo or the Poro, are devising imagery straight out of the ethnographies of Boas and Talbot. It is as if ordinary people know, instinctively, that the greater the inequality, the stranger and more occult the rituals that reinforce it need to be.

Is he right? I am confident he is not, for reasons I could go into, but I’d much rather heretics here read his article, come up with their own critiques, and discuss them in the Comments space. Lambert’s theory is mesmerising, and that is why I have dwelt on it at some length. My belief is that if we are to retain our own sanity amidst the crazy junk that is going around – including very sophisticated junk such as Lambert’s – we need to engage our brains and confront all this weirdness unflinchingly.

IT’S THE PLATFORMS, INNIT?

The UK is taking another step towards banning social media for under-16s this week as technology secretary Liz Kendall launches a consultation on the policy. According to the Guardian, insiders are increasingly sure prime minister Keir Starmer will back the idea.

When I last blogged on the subject in “How to rewild Generation Doomscroll” a year ago, I acknowledged that the public and political momentum towards a ban could be a classic case of yet another moral panic, but also admitted there is a real problem that ought not to be ignored, because there is just too much evidence out there of elevated rates of mental illness among teenagers, and of social media sites that “encourage troubled teens to harm themselves in a whole bunch of awful ways, including a morbid focus on weight reduction (anorexia), self-cutting, and even the promotion of suicide.”

I still believe there is a genuine and massive problem to be addressed, but the case presented for an under-16 ban looks weaker now than it did when evidence claiming to show social media as a primary cause of teenage angst was confidently advanced by psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Remarkably, a ban was also backed by Lenore Skenazy, who had made a name for herself as an advocate for liberating children, even preteens, from stifling and unnecessary restrictions. She was dubbed World’s Worst Mum after letting her nine-year-old son ride the New York Subway alone, but managed to turn the tables by hosting a TV series with that title. Her book and website Free-Range Kids were also massive.

More recently, though, there has been a significant challenge to the case put forward by Haidt. Speaking in the House of Lords last month, Claire Fox spoke of new research at Manchester University debunking the claim that social media has increased teenagers’ symptoms of anxiety or depression. Baroness Fox may be known to heretics as the libertarian director and founder of think tank the Academy of Ideas, and is often to be heard on BBC Radio’s flagship ethics programme, Moral Maze.

She also said the chair of the National Suicide Prevention Strategy Advisory Group, Professor Louis Appleby, had pointed out that self-harming in the young began well before social media took hold in that age group. And she added: “An Oxford University study of nearly 12,000 children showed no correlation between screen time, including social media, and mental health. Instead, the way in which children engage with social media is what determines its impact and – shock horror – in many instances, evidence shows the positive impact of social-media use.”

For another thing, the politics of the 12 months since I last visited the subject here have not been encouraging in terms of what Lenore Skenazy, especially, was advocating for the “rewilding” of children. She pointed out that children and younger teenagers have been increasingly trapped at home from early childhood onwards (thanks partly to parental fears over “stranger danger” but also the closure of youth clubs, sports facilities, etc., in times of public spending cuts) with little to do but online activities including “doomscrolling”.

Skenazy felt an under-16 social ban could only work if coupled with giving kids greater real-life freedom, letting them get out and about, spending plenty of face time with their peers and socialising with adults other than their parents – adults who in all likelihood would be either friends of their parents or otherwise trustworthy people (including MAPs) known to them. While it makes sense for parents to warn their kids against “wrong uns” (as my parents did), teaching kids that “stranger” equals “”predator” merely encourages timidity, keeping them ignorant of the world and holding back their social education.

She was right, but the political discourse in recent months has been all about restricting youngsters online, with next to zero emphasis on real-life rewilding. Without such rewilding a social media ban on its own would be disastrous in itself, not least because, as Fox points out, the online world is by no means entirely bad for them. As she said in the Lords:

Despite histrionic headlines, social media can be used for self-educational ends. There is a new generation of autodidacts who are teaching themselves coding, video producing, editing and even musical instruments, languages and chess. I know that sounds rose-tinted and a bit glib, but social media often is a tool for connections – finding your tribe, making new friends – and a place where you can cultivate solidarity and autonomy as a young person. It can be a counter to the social trend towards fragmentation.

How refreshing to hear this! I might also add that we can always find extreme cases in which kids have lost their lives after visiting sites encouraging suicide etc., which is tragic and terrible, but in one recent case blocking kids’ online access has likewise proved disastrous. In India last month it was reported that three sisters, aged 16, 14 and 12 killed themselves together by jumping from a high balcony at home. They were said to have been upset that their father had taken away their mobile phone. While this was clearly a rare, bizarre case, the same could be said of death and other extreme harm with a clear connection to social media use.

All of which leaves with a question. What is to be done?

The big problem with state intervention is that laws restricting personal freedom tend to go badly wrong. Such laws are often passed in haste (yes, in an atmosphere of moral panic), with too little detailed consideration of their practical consequences, which often include the possibility of them being applied too broadly and in a heavy-handed way by often over-zealous police and other enforcement agencies.

It is becoming ever clearer that this is not the way forward. As for what might be, I have “listened to the victims” on this one, or at least to their parents – the ones whose children have died in social media tragedies. Real victims, in other words, not the bogus ones who are so often loud in the media, as in the Epstein case. A piece in The Times a few days ago made for sobering reading, but with positive suggestions. The print-edition headline speaks for itself: “Social media killed our children: the club that no parent wants to join”.

The report by Caroline Scott (The Times Magazine, 26 February) on a group called Bereaved Families for Online Safety includes genuinely harrowing accounts and a range of opinions, as might be expected. A running theme was danger from the algorithms, and the attention economy that is driving the social media platforms.

One parent I found particularly persuasive was Ian Russell, founder of Bereaved Families, whose 14-year-old daughter, Molly, took her own life in 2017 after viewing social media sites that encouraged self-harm and suicide. What he is looking for is more accountability from tech companies, who have been irresponsibly fostering extreme content because it is attention-getting, driving users’ eyes and advertisers’ money in their direction.

The most effective way to reign-in such excesses may well be through civil lawsuits rather than laws like the UK’s Online Safety Act, which has been both ineffectual (a few porn companies have been fined for breaching age restrictions but the fines are being left unpaid) and unnecessarily heavy-handed on those (including teens and preteens) who would not be harmed simply by seeing “what comes naturally”.

The first lawsuits claiming that Instagram and YouTube deliberately harm children are now under way in the US, while TikTok and Snapchat have already settled out of court. The latter two platforms may have escaped relatively lightly, but if the Insta/YT case goes all the way these corporations could face punitive damages on a scale big enough to impact their policies. They wouldn’t be able to avoid paying, either, which would jeopardise their operations in their biggest market.

Significantly, Russell also established the Molly Russell Foundation in 2018, which undertakes research and campaigns for greater social media accountability. He now believes, in the light of his long and research-informed engagement with the problem, that a blanket social media ban distracts from the real issue: pathologically unsafe platforms by design. The focus, he feels, should be on eliminating toxic algorithms and addictive recommendation systems, rather than removing children from online spaces. I agree. How about you?

‘RADICALISATION’: WHERE ARE WE GOING?

Continuing the social media theme, an online-focused article in the Guardian last month gave us the dramatic headline “Police arresting 1,000 paedophile suspects a month across UK”, with a strapline under it telling us “National Crime Agency says rise in child sexual abuse being driven by technology and online forums”.

Crime reporter Vikram Dodd added in his opening paragraph that “the number of children being rescued from harm” has risen by 50% in the last five years. While we are all too familiar with alarmist claims by the police and “child protection” lobbyists, the NCA seems to be stepping up its use of language familiar from counter-terrorist action when talking about MAPs, notably the word “radicalisation”.

Dodd continues: “The National Crime Agency said the growth in offending across the UK was driven by technology and linked to the radicalisation of offenders in online forums, encouraging people to view images of child sexual abuse by reassuring them it was normal.”

Rob Jones, the NCA’s director general of operations, reportedly said that these days “Children are more reliant on the internet, and what we see from offenders is a move to collaborate and coordinate activities on the dark web, but to use the open web as a discovery platform to identify and abuse vulnerable children.”

Dodd continues:

Jones said potential offenders were introduced to material by algorithms, and forums told people interested in the sexual abuse of children that they were not criminals.

“I think, societally, things have changed … If you go into an online forum and you’ve got a sexual interest in children, you’ll be told that you are normal.

“Because of the way algorithms drive people with like-minded interests together, because of the way people operate, they will be told that what they are doing is normal, it will be rationalised, it will be normalised, and then you will see almost a radicalisation process where their behaviour will be encouraged, and they will be told that everything they’ve been told, that’s told them it’s wrong throughout their life, it’s the opposite.”

Jones said offenders were “determined” and had adapted to avoid detection, but that technology companies could and should do more.

Unusually, and ironically, I find myself, as per my previous item above, agreeing with the NCA that the tech companies should be doing more to avoid children being harmed on the social media platforms. It’s just that we probably do not entirely agree on the nature of the harms in question!

What should alarm us, though, is talk of forums that contribute to “radicalisation”. Which forums, exactly, do they mean? And how would they define “radicalisation” and guard against that term’s potential chilling effect on the legitimate expression of opinion? How would they ensure the concept would not be used to inhibit scientific research that might contradict the mainstream view of harm?

What about a forum you may have heard of, called Heretic TOC? Do our heresies count as ““radicalisation” to be eliminated? Or my book Paedophilia: The Radical Case, in fully legal circulation for decades but with that dangerous word “radical” right there in its title.

So, we should ask, Where are you going with this, NCA? Quo vadis? What is your end game?

AELLA’S BIG KINK SURVEY

Now something more upbeat: apparently, a wonderful new information resource. I cannot be too sure about that because I have not had the time to explore it properly yet and probably lack the skill to get the best out of it. Those here who are better trained than I am in carefully drawing valid inferences from big data sets are encouraged to check it out for themselves and tell us what they find.

This new resource is Aella’s Big Kink Survey. The name Aella may well be familiar to some heretics here as a camgirl who became one of the highest-earning creators on OnlyFans. Not just a pretty face, she has also written extensively about the psychology and economics of online sex work, conducting extensive surveys and research in the field. Psychologist J. Michael Bailey has called her online surveys “some of the broadest insights that we have into sexuality in the 2020s”.

Aella posted about her Big Kink Survey recently on Mike’s Sexnet forum, which is where I heard about it. She said:

Hey! My big kink survey is now nearing a million cleaned responses, and I’ve made a powerful explorer for you to check evidence for any hypotheses you may have about sex or fetishes.

There’s around 900 variables to explore, most of those fetish related. There’s also a ton of stuff around childhood, personality, porn use, religious upbringing, physical appearance, current menstrual cycle position, etc.!

It’s at BigKinkSurvey.com! It’s got a ton of data on various stuff I’ve seen asked about in this listserv – fisting, trans sexuality and childhood, offender rates, pedophilia, etc. I recommend using the searchbar or radial explorer to more quickly find what you’re looking for.

This is such a labor of love and I’m really excited about it.

Her post included this bar chart as an example of what you can find:

This looks fascinating but I am not at all sure how to interpret the figures given with the chart, apart from their depiction of what appears to be a positive correlation between those who experienced spanking in childhood and those who later find it sexually arousing. I would be very wary indeed about reading too much into this without further information on the work.

Note a further comment by Mike Bailey recorded in Aella’s Wikipedia entry. He has criticized her “casualness” but praised her willingness to brook controversy and said her work was worthwhile. 

As I say, it looks worth exploring… with care. So, intrepid explorers, over to you!

It’s not that I have been indicted for crimes against humanity, although I’m sure there are those who think I should be. Rather, on this occasion I find myself on the victim side of the justice system in common with – amazingly – the court’s judges.

The court’s woes began when the infamously infantile US president threw a tantrum against them for upsetting his little playmate Benjamin Netanyahu. As may be recalled, the ICC indicted Israel’s prime minister in November 2024 for alleged war crimes in Gaza. Trump immediately denounced the court over this, and soon afterwards its justices found they had lost access to all their Microsoft accounts – emails, documents, and probably everything covered by the MS 365 service, which includes access to cloud backup (OneDrive) and key tools such as Word and Excel.

It started when Microsoft disconnected the email account of ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan KC after he was personally sanctioned by the Trump administration for pursuing arrest warrants related to Gaza. Soon after that the court’s judges found they had been “bricked” by Microsoft, according to one report. When people talk about a “brick” mobile phone, I gather they usually mean a dumb one, like the early models that were big as a brick and no smarter than an old-fashioned landline.  As applied to a computer, though, the term can mean a machine rendered even more lifeless, inert as a brick. As I now know from painful personal experience, the corporation can do this by disabling the PIN that would normally be your password to get past the lock-screen to Windows.

Sensibly, the ICC’s answer to their problem late last year was to ditch Microsoft Office in favour of openDesk, a German-developed open-source alternative designed for public sector digital sovereignty. But solving the court’s data security problem will not be that easy. As an expert from the University of Reading has observed:

The court’s evidence management platform, Project Harmony, operates in partnership with Microsoft. Current announcements leave unclear whether this transition will sever that connection. If the ICC’s ties to Microsoft are not completely eliminated, future US sanctions could cripple the court’s investigation processes and savage its ability to pursue international justice.

Very serious stuff, which perfectly illustrates how vulnerable we have all become not just to the whims of the American president but also to the big tech platforms on which so many of us have come to rely – and to trust, despite the fact that those in the know have been warning us about their untrustworthiness for years.

So, what about Heretic TOC? How come your host here was also bricked, late last year? I have so far been unable to get a clear answer out of Microsoft, but my strong suspicion is that several of the big American corporations, perhaps all of them, have been tightening up their “user guidelines” in response to the growing body of regulatory legislation around the globe, especially from the EU and UK.

As a concrete example, a week or so ago I asked Adobe Acrobat’s “AI assistant” to provide a summary of the key arguments in a new academic paper in the Journal of the History of Sexuality. It refused, saying to do so would violate the guidelines. In what way? It is not obvious from the guidelines themselves, which forbid stuff like the promotion of self-harm, hate-speech, glorifying violence, child porn (what a surprise!) and terrorism.

The academic paper it baulked at did not fail any of the tests, as far as I could see, even on the broadest interpretation. Its only “crime” seems to be the subject, as the paper (to which we were alerted recently in a comment here by Prue) is titled “No Seduction, No Harm: Public Acceptance of Pedophilia in Norway in the 1970s”. It looks as though Adobe’s algorithm didn’t like the P word, or detected its excessive use within the document along with other key words putting children and sex in the same context.

Interestingly, only a few days later I tried again and this time it decided the paper was OK after all and duly provided the requested summary. So it could be that the AI is learning to distinguish “respectable” academic discourse from… Well, from what? From heretical advocacy, perhaps, as found at Heretic TOC? Whatever is going on, the reach of corporate censorship is clearly becoming sinister because it goes far beyond matters of taste in public postings on a social media forum like X or Instagram, where other peoples’ rights are genuinely engaged via matters such as libel and the use of personal images.

The ICC case, and my own, are much more serious. They are about a business corporation, whether at the direct command of an authoritarian politician like Trump or pressure from regulatory bodies, seizing and freezing your private data, including all your files relating to your own personal bank account, names and contact details of everyone you have dealings with, from family and friends to your gas and electricity account details, stuff that could quickly see you cold, hungry and even homeless if you have no way of accessing your funds and paying your bills.

All because you are allegedly in breach of some obscure guideline or other, at the arbitrary whim of a massive, remote, corporate bureaucracy that won’t even specify the nature of the supposed offence and – as I soon discovered – who do their damnedest to prevent you discussing the matter with an actual human being on their staff. Perhaps they no longer have any, I don’t know. The entire shebang might now be just a giant AI topped off with its multi-billionaire ownership.

At this point I should warn you that what follows is not the easiest of reads and I doubt you will find it entertaining. It’s about what I have been through at the hands of Microsoft over the last three months, an experience ranging from frustrating, boring and time-wasting to downright alarming and even traumatic in the challenge presented to the very existence of my online identity and ability to be myself and live my life. The reason I am setting it out in some detail is to offer a warning: DON’T LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOU. The more you understand the ID and data loss hell you could face if you do nothing, the more chance you will wake up to the need for action to get out of danger.

OK, here goes. Late last November I had a No Reply email claiming to be from Microsoft Digital Trust and Safety. It had been sent to my Yahoo email, saying my MS account had been suspended for an unspecified breach of the Microsoft Services Agreement (MSA). At first I thought it was a scam, but when I tried to log in at the MS website I did indeed find myself blocked. So it was real.

But not too devastating at first. My Windows PIN was still working at this stage so I was able to use my laptop as normal, with access to at least my more recent files, which were on the computer itself (the C drive). I assumed the PIN would remain OK because it did not appear to depend on compliance with the MSA. After consulting the MSA terms of service, it looked as though the agreement governs only those MS services (notably Microsoft 365) you get along with the creation of your MS account, which you can access online with a password. Your access to Windows desktop, by contrast, is something you become entitled to when you pay for your Windows Licence, which is separate to the MSA. You get the Licence along with the computer when Windows comes pre-installed on it from the shop or online retailer. Maybe I should have known all this stuff, but I suspect most users are foggy about it until trouble strikes.

My older files were blocked, though, many of them important personal and financial ones, because those were stored only online, on the now inaccessible MS OneDrive cloud. They were files that had been created on a less high-powered laptop I’d stopped using a couple of years ago.  Fortunately, I already had full USB backup of all those older files. Also, my MS desktop email, Outlook, was blocked. I had not used this desktop email for a long time, though, so no problem. Thus I was still in business and able to check out Windows Help info online, although this just sent me round and round in circles – an all too familiar hassle not confined to MS.

Next stop a chat with an actual human at Customer Support then? Not a chance! You can only access Support after logging into your account but I couldn’t do that because I was barred!  Catch 22! However, in the email from Digital Trust and Safety, I had been notified of a webpage where I could make an appeal against the suspension. So I keyed in all the required information onto the online form, including the grounds for appeal, and clicked on the Submit button. Nothing happened! I quadruple-checked I had entered everything correctly, trying different browsers to do so, but nothing happened except for the ominous appearance onscreen of a circle symbol with a diagonal bar across it, like a No Entry sign. It just seemed to be a cruel twist to the story, another way of rubbing in the basic fact: you’re barred!

Nor did a phone call to the UK headquarters of Microsoft in Reading do the trick. All you get there is an AI voice directing you back to the hopeless online Help. So, no help at all. This was driving me crazy!

With no help coming, even from ChatGPT (very reassuring tone, with genuinely sensible advice but no immediately successful outcome), a whole month passed in which I was getting constant notifications from MS on my newer laptop, saying I needed to confirm my identity in relation to my account, and telling me I should log in for this purpose. But how, when they had blocked me? Their left hand didn’t seem to know what their right was doing.

That is probably why, on Christmas Eve and after giving me a month’s notice to respond to the notifications, they totally bricked me, escalating from the original “soft brick” to a full-on “hard brick”. That is when they disabled my Windows PIN, so I could no  longer get past the lock-screen.

My old laptop was still OK, though, accessible via its different PIN. And now I eventually found help in a location where I least expected it: the legal small print of the terms of service. There you can find a sort of nuclear option that enables you to demand access to your data via the legally enforceable provisions of the  EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which has also been adopted into UK law via the Data Protection Act. ChatGPT had pointed this out to me and now it seemed time to act on it.

Down in the bowels of the legal stuff there is a Dublin phone number for Microsoft Digital Trust and Safety. From anywhere in Europe, this is the right place to make a Subject Access Request for access to your data. It’s not a human who answers the phone, of course, you just leave a message when the AI tells you to. I left a short message but it did not seem adequate to the gravity of the situation and I had no confidence it would be acted on. So, in addition, I printed off a detailed letter on my old laptop and snail-mailed it to the postal address of the Microsoft Digital Trust and Safety HQ. As a belt-and-braces job, at great expense, I paid for the track and trace service that makes sure your letter is signed for on arrival. A response duly came to my Yahoo email without undue delay, after just over a week. This time I was given a proper reference number for the enquiry and a named agent handing it. A set of procedures was set out through which I could (so they said) log into my MS account and potentially recover my frozen data.

Meanwhile, though, I had taken my own drastic action to reactivate my bricked laptop. I got a techie friend to get past the lock-screen using the Shift+Restart trick, which brings up various options including totally reinstalling Windows. The downside is that you lose all your files because these are on the bricked (or “bitlocked”) drive. After making sure all my files were backed up to USB, and after making a hard-copy note of a ridiculously long, 48-digit, “Recovery Key” unique to each PC that you need when re-installing, we took the plunge and went ahead. It is important to understand, by the way, that the only way to recover the Recovery Key itself, if you have lost it, is to find it by logging into your MS account online – which, like so much else is not an option when your account is suspended. It was merely by lucky chance that I already had a copy of this key.

Happily, the reinstallation went well. This time, I was able to set up a new lock-screen PIN with a “local account” i.e. the account is located on your own machine, under your own control, rather than one that leaves MS able to pull the strings remotely.

So, now that I have managed to restore my files, along with gaining a measure of independence from MS, I find myself at a digital security crossroads. Do I go ahead with the data Subject Access Request, which I do not strictly need to make because I have recovered the data myself? Or do I say to hell with MS, it’s time to cut myself off entirely from their heavy-handed surveillance, content censorship, brutally user-unfriendly Trust and Safety system (it’s not safe and cannot be trusted), and communications hassles?

Put like that, it sounds a no-brainer. I should obviously try an alternative – preferably not another big corporation that ties you to its propriety software, such as Apple, but instead a system using open-source software, as recommended by freedom-conscious techies. Linux is the way to go, apparently. It’s not just for techies these days. Linux Mint, Cinnamon Edition, is said to look and function much like Windows, so there isn’t too much new stuff to learn. I am definitely thinking of giving it a go, maybe hooked up to Proton cloud backup.

There is a downside, though. MS software programs such as Word have been developed over a long time and the alternatives, in my limited experience (notably LibreOffice recently), tend not to work anything like as well. So I might invest in a Linux machine for data security but keep a Windows machine for ease of use, although that might present a problem for synching across all devices, which is a great convenience but also a massive source of vulnerability to corporate control.

Decisions, decisions!  The hassle helps explain why so many of us ordinary laptop users tend to be “winfags”, as the derogatory expression for Windows addicts has it. We know we are on the wrong end of a deeply abusive relationship with MS but we cannot bring ourselves to split from this controlling, manipulative partner! Now, though, I am determined to give it a go.

FROM GROK TO GLORY

So much has been going on in the world lately, with you-know-who making waves from Gaza to Greenland, it’s hard to keep up with even strictly HTOC-relevant developments while confining myself to just one big blog every six weeks or so. Maybe I should publish more often, as I used to, every week, or every fortnight.

I can no longer commit to that, alas, but I will try to get another blog out fairly soon on some of the hottest recent topics. The Groky horror story over alleged AI child “nudification”, or at least G-stringification, is old news now (except that the European Commission announced only yesterday that they have started an inquiry into this), but the related social media theme of an Under-16 ban is gaining traction fast, and needs a further airing here following my focus on the topic in “How to rewild Generation Doomscroll” a couple of years ago.

The G theme continues with two other notable developments: Gjerde, and “glorification”. Åsmund Borgen Gjerde is the guy who wrote the paper referred to in my lead story above, on the public acceptance of paedophilia in Norway in the 1970s. I have now read this paper and discovered it is well worth talking about here, despite its scholarly remoteness from mainstream thinking today.

As for “glorification”, unfortunately MAP activism looks set to be the next big target of this dubious legal concept in the UK unless the Left in particular gets real and rediscovers the importance of freedom of expression.

We have seen legislation in the UK against “glorifying” terrorism, a law that has been woefully cited against peaceful protesters in the Palestine Action case.  And in the Netherlands the law already in place against “glorifying” paedophilia has been used to devastating effect against Dutch MAP activists.

Now, thanks an excellent and justifiably alarming new article by Brian Ribbon, we are being alerted to a debate in the House of Lords last month in which similar legislation was proposed for the UK by Baroness Bertin and supported in other speeches. It was not offered immediate support by the government, but justice minister Baroness Levitt had warm words for those favouring the measure.  The government could well decide to include something like it in a Bill of their own after further consideration.

So it is certainly something we need to keep an eye on, and more: pre-emptive lobbying may be in order. The implications for MAP forums and blogs like this could be existential unless it can be stopped, and even sympathetic academic discussion could be frozen out.

New data released following a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request show that prosecutions for real “child sexual abuse images” in the UK  have fallen by more than half since 2017, even as cases involving purely fictional or AI-generated material have surged to nearly 40% of all image offences. The information is drawn from the CPS Case Management Information System.

Who is telling us? The new and ambitious California-based Center for Online Safety and Liberty (COSL). The revelations were announced this week at a webinar to launch a 62-page report called Drawing the Line: Watchlist 2025, which surveyed the law and current developments in 10 countries, from major Anglophone ones (Australia, Canada, UK, USA) to more linguistically and culturally diverse places (Costa Rica, Denmark, France, Iran, Japan, South Korea).

Heretic TOC was among the 30 or so participants who had a virtual presence at the event, as was Bly Rede, of Virtuous Pedophiles. Not that any other MAP engagement was discernible. COSL has a finger in many pies, describing itself as a “nonprofit acting as the parent entity for multiple independent projects aligned with our mission, to empower individuals and communities to thrive online by building safer spaces, fostering creativity, combating harm, and championing digital rights and freedom”.

If that sounds bland, bureaucratic, and vague, it could be because the organisation’s Chair, Jeremy Malcolm, is a savvy human rights lawyer branding himself as a respectable “trust and safety consultant” He doesn’t want to frighten the horses. Understandably so. His last venture, the Prostasia Foundation, was wound up in September after drawing too much flak from hostile forces, as reported by Strat and Prue in HTOC’s comments space.

There’s nothing bland about Watchlist 2025’s most striking finding, though, which would be a genuine scoop if the media were interested in anything beyond paedo-bashing.

In the Q&A chat space available during the presentation, I asked whether those involved with Drawing the Line have any idea why there is such a strong trend towards prosecutions for fictional sexual material (FSM, in the ever-expanding jargon) rather than images of real children. Had policing the internet been so  successful that such images have become much harder to access?

Malcolm answered, saying their hypothesis is that law enforcement resources are limited, in the UK and elsewhere, meaning there is always a backlog of images to be processed, “so virtual content displaces real content”. This could make sense if “processing” images of real children is much more time-consuming than processing FSM, but it is not obvious why this would be so. The main element of processing is inspecting the material and deciding whether it is illegal. In both cases the bar is set very low, making the police and prosecutor’s case relatively simple.

VirPed’s Ethan Edwards had a different explanation, one that I found somewhat more persuasive, when the headline figures were announced by Malcolm on Sexnet, along with the invitation to the webinar. Ethan wrote:

It isn’t news that if you give an agency money to address problem X but they can’t find a way to spend it to effectively combat X, they will look for a related Y and spend the money on that instead of leaving the money unspent. Michael Seto in “Internet Sex Offenders” implied this regarding child protection money (in Florida, I think) being spent to go online and impersonate young teen girls looking for sex with men.

So if the money spent to catch those with fictional material yields a higher rate of return (there’s likely some low-hanging fruit if it just recently became illegal), then it will be natural they will spend the money that way.

I also asked whether Drawing the Line was aware of any current research on the positive benefits of FSM, pointing out that plenty of research has been done in a number of countries, including Denmark, the Czech Republic and Japan, showing a strong association between the easy accessibility, not that long ago, of child porn and a reduction in sex offending against children. Those studies showed a clear, consistent correlation, but was there any work that might show a causal connection?

Malcolm replied that such research had indeed been considered but said it hits the buffers on ethical grounds. Why? Well, you’d need an experiment with say a thousand convicted hands-on sex offenders. You would exempt them from the porn laws, giving them unlimited access to child porn (as hard-core as they wanted) and compare them at the end of, say, a five-year period, with a thousand similar offenders who were not given this privilege. If the porn access group offend at a significantly lower rate than the non-access group in this period, and possible confounding factors are controlled for, then your hypothesis stands up and you have a valuable new finding.

I say, what’s not to like about that? But apparently research ethics boards might see some pettifogging downside that presently escapes me!

There’s plenty to ponder in Watchlist 2025, believe me. Heretics here can catch up on all this in more detail by downloading the full report or by listening to a recording of the webinar. There is also a background paper on the principles guiding Drawing the Line. The basics are captured in the infographics presented in the webinar, some of which are incorporated in this blog, including a set of recommendations aimed mainly at governments.

In addition to an admirably well-prepared and clear presentation on Watchlist 2025 by Jeremy Malcolm, the webinar included searching questions put to three guest speakers by his co-host Brandy Brightman, described at COSL as having a long involvement in online communities and a background in the tech sector.

The panellists included Emma Shapiro, editor-at-large with Don’t Delete Art, which tackles online art censorship. Shapiro is an artist herself, but my eye was taken by another name on the organisation’s team: Spencer Tunick. Regrettably, I don’t know much about contemporary artists, but this guy is someone I had certainly heard of. He is the very high-profile photographer who made a name for himself doing mass nude photoshoots in prominent public places, including one event when about 18,000 people posed for him naked in Mexico City’s  principal square, the Zócalo.

The other speakers were Ashley Remminga, a “scholar of transgender participation in fandom”, and Zora Rush, described as a “responsible” (i.e. ethical) AI expert – despite working for Microsoft, which is not everyone’s idea of an ethical company.

Nevertheless, of the three guest speakers, I felt that Rush, working as a linguistics specialist on the interpretation of human language by AI, was the most well placed to address where things are heading, at least as regards how Silicon Valley is thinking about such problems as heavy-handed algorithmic content moderation, American cultural bias over alleged unacceptable content, and so on. The answers were mildly encouraging if on the thin side, but I wouldn’t fault any of the speakers for the paucity of solutions: the online world is still in its infancy compared to printed communications, and everyone is struggling with the dizzying pace of tech developments and the awesome power of the big platforms’ billionaire bosses.

But the report, Watchlist 2025, is a richly informative document, a model of clarity, and a source of carefully considered, positive proposals,  reflecting the obvious fact that although COSL is a new venture, it appears to have inherited a great deal of expertise and projects in progress from Prostasia. It is not starting from Ground Zero. Far from being left only with smoking rubble when that organisation was nuked, there has been an impressively nimble, well-resourced rebuilding and rebranding.

Yet as I write, I can almost hear the cynical scoffing of the naysayers, prompted precisely by this seamless continuity from one organisation to the next. COSL, they will say, has learnt nothing. It is simply repeating Prostasia’s mistakes and is inevitably destined to suffer the same fate. Yes, COSL is less obviously MAP-adjacent, but it won’t take long before the haters out it as a MAP-front operation – although that would be wide of the mark because COSL seems to be more in bed with the “abuse” prevention people than with MAPs per se.

One of the naysayers, though, has an interestingly different critique. This is Kit, occasionally of this parish, who wrote on BoyChat after Prostasia put up the shutters:

The problem with Prostasia was not a “persistent wave of misinformation and smear campaigns”, but rather the contradictions and logical contortions of their own position.

Prostasia wanted to be “pro-sex” – an astonishingly vacuous posture – while also being “anti-abuse.” It wanted to be liberal and censorious, permissive and forbidding, libertarian and (as its own name suggests) paternalistic.

Prostasia was tripped up by its own muddle-headed ideology – its antithetical commitment both to sexual liberation and to abuse prevention – but it is hardly alone in this. Prostasia’s confusion is the confusion of the liberal sexual ethic in the West more generally.

Our culture is torn between the libidinous dream of an innocent sexual pornutopia on the one hand, and on the other the terrorising nightmare of vampiric male sexual aggression.

There is simply no way that perverts can negotiate their way into this contradiction. And I really wonder why any of us would ever want to.

Do I agree with this eloquent tirade? A bit. There is certainly a case to be answered. The key contradiction Kit identifies is right there in the name: the Center for Online Safety and Liberty. Are liberty and safety compatible? I would say there is an unavoidable tension between the two, but that is not the end of the story. Life is often about balancing pressures and finding the least uncomfortable way to live with the pros and cons of competing values. Or to use COSL’s own metaphor, lines must be drawn between the acceptable and the unacceptable.

As Kit rightly pointed out, the name Prostasia has paternalistic overtones. The name comes from the Greek word for “protection”, signifying, as the organisation candidly said, that “we are a child protection organization”. Nothing wrong with that. The protection of children from real harms, such as exploitative child labour, with exposure to long hours, dangerous machinery, etc., or to non-consensual sexual assault, is a worthy aim. To me, though, the name Prostasia suggested “pro the Stasi”, thanks to their seemingly uncritical support, along with the VirPeds, for an intrusive, surveillance-led, law-enforcement regime hell-bent on giving so-called “pro-contact” MAPs a hard time no matter how good their relationship with a child might be.

Whether on balance we feel COSL, and more specifically the Drawing the Line: Watchlist 2025, is doing a good job, should be seen, I believe, in the light of its work rather than its title, or questionable elements of its mission statement. With that in mind I will leave you with a key paragraph from the report itself, in the Executive Summary of Watchlist 2025. Ask yourselves whether this finding is an important one, worth the effort of establishing its reality? I suggest it is hugely important, but you will make up your own minds. Here goes:

The core finding of the Watchlist is the identification of a dangerous legislative trend: the blurring of the essential legal distinction between content that records or causes concrete harm to real children, and content that is purely fictional, artistic, or imaginative. By treating fictional works — such as drawings or stories that evoke taboo themes — the same as evidence of real abuse under the single umbrella term of CSAM, the global response is expanding state power and sacrificing core liberties.

HONOURING THE LATE GREAT KENNEDY

No, not the assassinated US president but the distinguished American mathematician, biographer, translator, and pioneer gay activist Hubert Kennedy, who died last month aged 94.

My personal reason for honouring his memory is that he contributed a glowing review of my book Paedophilia: The Radical Case in The Advocate and also wrote a four-page foreword for the paperback edition in 1982 in which he dared to agree with my main controversial arguments, notably saying he thought I was at my best on consent, and that I made a “convincing case that the powerful side in a paedophilic relation is not automatically, or generally, the adult”.

MAPs can also thank him for his translations of boy-love novels by the German anarchist writer John Henry Mackay, and gays more widely are in his debt for his biography of the German jurist and pioneering gay liberationist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs.

Even his day job as a professor of mathematics turns out to include something of interest for those of us who might be triggered by trigonometry and terrified of topology. Kennedy appears to have been the first western scholar to have studied the mathematical manuscripts of Karl Marx, after their first publication in the Soviet Union in 1968.

Maths? By the author of The Communist Manifesto and Capital? Who knew? But it’s a fact, folks. The old revolutionary left a thousand pages, no less, of mathematical notes aimed at establishing the foundations of calculus. Kennedy concluded that Marx’s work in this field was less earth-shattering than his contributions to revolutionary politics, but he did make some “independent discoveries” and anticipated some 20th century developments in maths.

Kennedy also worked on theoretical genetics and provided a mathematical proof of the impossibility of an organism that requires more than two sexes in order to reproduce – but queer theorists might not thank him for this one!

I might just add that Kennedy’s death came to my attention thanks to a couple of projects I have been involved with lately for new editions of Paedophilia: The Radical Case. These are an edition in German and an audio version. Neither was my own idea. Both were initiated by MAP activists. Delighted by their proposal of such useful projects, and their commitment to putting time and thought into the practicalities, I had no hesitation in deciding to help where I could.

On the audio front, tests have already been run using my voice and some AI ones as the basis for the narration of the book. I was hugely impressed by one of the AI voices on offer – not only a beautiful timbre but a good variation of pace and tone that matched the meaning very well, making the whole thing clear, pleasant to  the ear, and easy to understand. My own reading, by unflattering contrast, included an element of slurring and stumbling, despite my best and most sober efforts.

Our provisional conclusion  is that I should be the reader for the Preface, just for a sense of authenticity: some readers may wish to find out what the actual author sounds like. The rest of the book, however, is likely to be in a splendidly sonorous AI voice, which I suppose has been trained on readings by top quality professional actors.

As for the German edition – well, for both editions really – I will be writing a new introduction, or foreword, of some sort. My first thoughts along these lines naturally took me back to Hubert Kennedy’s foreword, which led me google him and discover he is no longer with us.

I was also reminded of an afterword to the paperback edition written by Dan Franklin. Dan had been the commissioning editor of the hardback two years earlier, in 1980. He had written to me out of the blue at the time when PIE, and my leadership of the organisation, were very much in the news. Working as an editor with Peter Owen Publishers, London, he invited me to write a book on paedophilia as one of the company’s titles. And lo, it came to pass.

What I did not know at first  was how lucky I was to have Dan as my editor, but I soon discovered he was a great guy, easy to get on with, and with lots of good advice on the writing. He was a young man then, in the early days of his publishing career. It was no surprise to me that he would do well in the business, but even with my insider knowledge I could not have known just how well.

Dan rose to become one of the most influential figures in British publishing. Described in The Guardian as “the publishing colossus behind Britain’s superstar authors”, as publishing director with Jonathan Cape Ltd he brought out the novels of prize-winning, best-selling writers including Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan. He also secured the rights to Michael Jackson’s Moonwalk and published Thomas Harris’s blockbuster, The Silence of the Lambs.

Strikingly, though, Dan is all too aware that publishers these days are finding it much tougher to take risks by publishing controversial books such as Lolita (and of course mine!) Emily Mortimer spoke to him for an article in The New York Times on cancel culture. She said:

It wasn’t just me concerning myself with the question of whether Lolita would find a publisher today. Dan Franklin, who published Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie at Jonathan Cape, has speculated on the subject too: “I wouldn’t publish Lolita. What’s different today is #MeToo and social media – you can organise outrage at the drop of a hat. If Lolita was offered to me today, I’d never be able to get it past the acquisition team – a committee of 30-year-olds, who’d say, ‘If you publish this book we will all resign.’”

THE HORROR, THE HORROR

Kurtz’s  dying words, familiar from Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now and the novel that inspired it, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, evoke real horror, truly horrible horror. Not that we need fiction to tell us what real horror is when Gaza, Ukraine, and Sudan remind us daily.

By comparison, some of the alleged abuse horrors we are now hearing about would seem comically benign if it were not for the genuinely awful and undeserved fate that tends to befall the alleged abusers.

We’ve had a classic example this month in the case of nursery worker Vincent Chan, who filmed himself in sexual acts with children. The word “horrific” appears in the Yahoo News version of the story no fewer than four times to describe what happened, which appears to have been no more than touching and mild penetration of some sort – by a tongue, perhaps. He was not charged with rape or attempted rape, as he surely would have been if he had been at all forceful or unpleasant with these little kids. Also, backing my interpretation, he had worked at the nursery for nearly seven years without any suggestion that any child had complained about him, or that he was anything but well liked.

Yet his behaviour was described as “horrific” – and also “callous”, “cruel”, “predatory”, “sickening”, “despicable”, “appalling”, “devastating”, “a violation”, and “a betrayal”.

What brought about his downfall, bizarrely, was when a member of the nursery staff reported that “he had callously filmed a child falling asleep in their food and set it to music, before showing the clip to a colleague”.

Callously? Isn’t this the sort of clip most people would think was cute if they saw it on TikTok or YouTube? Chan seems to have expected, not unreasonably, that his fellow nursery worker would be amused, not horrified. Others might have seen the funny side, but the poor guy had the bad luck to show it to someone without a sense of humour.

Or perhaps someone who had long had their suspicions about Chan but had nothing else to go on. If so, it was a hunch the police shared, because their investigations took them to his incriminating photos and videos. We can only speculate as to what these images depicted, but we can be sure of one thing: when Chan’s case comes up for sentencing, scheduled for January, the outcome for him will be truly horrific.

SALLY MANN’S LAWYER DAUGHTER

Sally Mann, the American artist whose photos of her own children sparked a huge controversy in the early 1990s when they were published in a book called Immediate Family, turned up recently as the guest on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs (DID).

Many heretics here will remember the fuss, and may have bought the book. No fewer than eight images in it that she had chosen for a travelling exhibition “could subject her to arrest” according to a federal prosecutor, because they showed the kids in varying degrees of nakedness. But she dodged the bullet. No arrest, no legal trouble. The attempt to brand her a pornographer failed. Instead, it propelled her into instant fame and fortune, and her reputation as a photographer has only grown over time, although as recently as this year her photos were “cancelled” – removed from an art gallery exhibition in Texas.

Those who saw the book will remember the setting, I’m sure. The three kids appeared to be enjoying a beautifully free, feral childhood on a sprawling farm with wide acres of land to explore in rural Virginia in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains and no one nagging them to keep their clothes clean or stop them climbing trees or skinny dipping in the river – certainly not Sally, their “mountain mama”!

It all looked very hillbilly, from the beat-up pickup truck to the wooden farmstead to the wildlife – the kids with squirrels, weasels, dogs, and even a just-hunted deer with its throat cut. There’s lazy living in the heat of the summer, the kids lounging naked on a scruffy, ramshackle veranda where we wouldn’t be surprised to see a good old boy in dungarees with a banjo on his knee and “the misty taste of moonshine” on his lips.

But appearances can be deceptive. This is no dirt-poor hick family eking out a left-behind, no-hope existence. Sally’s father was a country doctor. Both her parents were artistic intellectuals. These kids grew up with the benefits of bourgeois resources combined with bohemian freedom and culture.

Accused of being a bad mother, blighting her children’s future lives and prospects, she can be proud that her two daughters are doing very well. Jessie is herself an artist now, with a PhD in neuroscience; Virginia is a lawyer in New York. Both have their own thriving families. And who knows what her also promising son, Emmett, might have achieved but for a tragic accident that led ultimately to an early death?

And if the “New York lawyer” career sounds like a repudiation of the rural idyll, it doesn’t mean Virginia has turned into a hard-nosed female version of JD Vance, that famously self-styled hillbilly who made it to an elite law school and Vice President of the United States.

We only need to hear her singing to realise the family’s artistic side is strong within her. I urge you to do so. For the fourth of her eight chosen discs to take to the notional desert island on DID, Sally picked Virginia as the soprano soloist, singing the Christmas carol “O Holy Night” with her high school choir when she was in her mid-teens. It starts around 27 minutes into the show. It is heavenly and of course could hardly be more suitable listening at this time of the year.

THE GENERATION GAME, AMERICAN STYLE

TWO SIDES OF THE SAME COIN

In the first part of this guest blog, last month, I explained the devastating consequences that repression (self-inflicted) and oppression (exercised by others) of my homosexuality, had on me over the course of my adolescence, leading to several suicide attempts. I also explained that, as an adult, I had been chatting on Grindr with a 13-year-old boy who showed interest in a sexual encounter, and I told of the horrible experience I had in a legal consultation. I eventually decided not to meet the kid. Not because I would be doing anything wrong, but because I wanted to be free to tell my full story later, and to advocate for social and legal change.

I have come to the realisation that we are trapped in a system that is rotten to the core. The current debates on the age of consent are driven by the interests, expectations, needs, phobias, and prejudices of parents. Sex negationists deny youth sexuality, as if children had no identity, no preferences, and no sexual desire. It is as if youngsters were deemed incapable of taking the initiative, or as though being oppressed was just a minor inconvenience. Irrationality is cranked up by journalists who use the term “paedophile” in a sensationalistic way to generate click-bait headlines.

Adults suck, sometimes. The debate should return to what it should always have been about: the interests and needs of children themselves. However, our “justice” system doesn’t really care about what young people think, feel, or say about their sexuality. It takes them as mere legal artefacts, cute but innocent, silly brats, unripe fruit, or brittle China dolls we’d rather wrap in protective cotton wool and keep safe in a box. Youngsters are indeed immature, but, ironically, they are deprived of real experiences from which they would gain – guess what – maturity.

Sadly, legal consent involving minors and adults has been reduced to a completely dehumanised procedure for the convenience of a “justice” system designed to resolve cases through the brutal application of a simple “one size fits all” formula that fails to do justice to individual circumstances. It has become a bit like primary school Maths: “Tell me your age. Tell me ‘her’ age. Formula applied. We are done. Next.” This justice system is ostensibly for the protection of minors. But horny teenagers do not wait. Instead, they rush into furtive encounters, leaving them with a terrible fear of discovery and vulnerable to risks including abuse and STIs. I take sexual abuse seriously. So seriously that I don’t buy the utterly absurd idea that wanted relationships are the same for minors as unwanted ones. It is high time to rethink consent.

But, first, we need to lay a foundation from a philosophical and ethical perspective, to see what is at stake. In a way, oppression and abuse are two sides of the same coin. The common underlying principle is that you own your body, your intimacy is yours. The moment we are born, our body is ours, and we have an identity that will persist for the rest of our life. If our sexual intimacy is something so important, sacred, transcendental, ancestral, and which profoundly affects our dignity… then it must be so both in terms of inviolability and in terms of right to its use. Correct?

We can think of it this way: keeping innocent people out of prison is as important as putting guilty ones behind bars. The greater the punishment at stake, the more relevant that “as important” becomes, and the more necessary it is to correctly define what is an offence and what is not. In my view, any system that does not strongly recognise both sexual abuse and sexual oppression as core ethical concerns is flawed. In other words: Laws must not only exist to protect us from abuse; they are also there to ensure our freedom. And if you ask me how much sexual freedom is enough, I’ll ask you: How much gender equality do you think is enough? To put it in Foucaultian terms, sex shaming has an overwhelming yet underestimated power dynamic.

In the specific case of youth, to be fair, I do think they are more vulnerable to abuse. But people systematically overlook the fact that they are more vulnerable to oppression as well, since they are at a stage of life where they are completely dependent on their parents, do not have the right to vote, and are under high pressure to swallow pre-established social conventions. In the meantime, their libido increases along with their rapidly rising testosterone levels . Putting all this together, we can say that young people are highly impacted by both abuse and oppression.

Consequently, human rights should address sexual freedom both in terms of abuse and oppression. The right to be free from sexual abuse is recognised. But there is no recognised right to private intimate contact that is mutually desired. What is stopping this? One of the obvious pitfalls is child sexuality. By definition, human rights apply to all humans, so that if we recognise sexual freedom as a human right, we will inevitably have to address juvenile sexual freedom. However, the human rights conventions of the United Nations are still galaxies away* from such ideas . As a reminder, they still fail to effectively decriminalise homosexuality these days, even though ILGA surrendered in the debate on child sexuality three decades ago to satisfy the demands of the conservatives.  That was the price of acceptance into the UN club – an astronomically expensive price, I must add. I wonder when humanity will be mature enough to recognise sexual freedom as a human right.

But, hey, wait a moment! It would be totally wrong to treat adolescents just like adults, as they don’t have the same capabilities. I especially refer to the capacity for rejecting sexual propositions. Saying “no” is not that easy. Additionally, receiving a sexual proposition may come unexpectedly to a teenager, and this poses a problem. In other words, adolescents are not adults. They don’t start from a level playing field. Agreed. But adolescents are not toddlers either! In fact, a 5-year-old infant is not the same as a 10-year-old pre-teen, or a 15-year-old teenager, or a 20-year-old young adult. In my opinion, establishing a single age of consent (before which you are deemed sexually disabled, and after which you are deemed autonomous) doesn’t make much sense because it is poorly adapted to our nature. We don’t become autonomous overnight. It is more of a gradual process, isn’t it? Laws should strive to adapt to human nature, not the other way around! Therefore, for a start, we need a system that recognises different “stages of consent” (rather than a single “age of consent”).

Adolescents cannot consent autonomously. But this is by no means an excuse to oppress those who do want to have an intimate contact with someone. If you simply say “they can’t consent” you are basically saying you don’t care about their feelings and dignity, since you have already decided for them, but without them. They are not objects! Let’s not forget that we are talking about humans. Also, the “they can’t consent” rhetoric creates conflicts with sex education. How come we can have sex education activities below the age of consent? How come we can ask youth to respect the will of others if we don’t respect theirs?

Rather, we have the moral duty to respect their feelings and help them have contacts safely. Legal consent should establish guarantees, not limits. In the case of minors, I think two things should be added to the law with regard to age gaps, as strong indicators of consent: whether the minor is supervised by parents who knew about the intended contact, and whether the sexual encounter is explicit and organised on the initiative of the minor. I consider parental supervision especially important. Parents have the responsibility to safeguard the sexual freedom of their children as much as they have the responsibility to feed them.

We cannot sacrifice the freedom of some in order to protect others, as this creates a new injustice. The fact that real sexual abuse is rightly treated as criminal does not mean non-abusive acts should also be criminalised. In my view, it is an ethical perversion to curtail the sexual freedom of teenagers because “we hate abusers”, since this directs part of the punishment onto innocent youngsters and their partners. Also, restrictions cannot be based on “risk of abuse”, since this immediately establishes a prejudice. Instead, the goal of a fair system of legal consent is to make sure, to the greatest possible extent, that the will of every individual is respected. That’s what consent is in its essence: profound respect for the individual will.

*  Except for a remarkably bold development in a report two years ago sponsored by the UN but never endorsed by that organisation, which timidly rowed back when the proposals came under attack from then Senator Marco Rubio, who is now the US Secretary of State. This was a report by the International Commission of Jurists, as featured in a downpage Heretic TOC item headed “Let’s march to the 8 March tune”.

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Your regular heretic host resumes here:

GROOMED, BY MUSK AND ROBINSON

We have been around the “grooming gangs” block before. There have already been inquiries in Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford, Oldham and Bradford. And of course there was the vast, sprawling, multi-year, no-expense-spared Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) to which I testified when they wanted to hear about my involvement (which was zero) in the alleged VIP child abuse ring (also zilch), in parliament and government.

The so-called “Westminster strand” of the inquiry was founded entirely on the lies of a few fantasists, one of whom was later discredited and jailed – unlike the hacks and pols who chose to believe what common sense should have told them was ridiculous. They believed all the fake news, or said they did,  simply because it suited them to do so: it promoted a sensational narrative that promised to advance their own careers while kicking political opponents in the teeth, with one side denouncing Labour’s association (think NCCL, Harriet Harman) with people like me while the other side knocked fantasy Tory child abusers such as former prime minister Edward Heath.

“Strat”, in a recent comment here, rightly said a new grooming gangs inquiry will be a “useless and expensive” exercise, noting that Jim Gamble, a high-profile police figure who had been tipped to lead it, has pulled out. This, too, brings back that déjà vu feeling. Gamble’s withdrawal came when “survivors” expressed no confidence in a police-led inquiry. Likewise, IICSA had a rocky start when the alleged victims/survivors at that time refused to accept several experienced and respected figures as the inquiry head, finally settling for Prof. Alexis Jay, who had been in charge of the Rotherham inquiry.

If anything needs to be done to prevent genuinely coercive or violent sexual behaviour towards children, yet more inquiries are not going to help. When self-appointed victim/survivor leaders are given the “voice” they constantly claim is being ignored, they tend to end up squabbling among themselves, scrabbling to grab hold of the biggest megaphone and denouncing any voice except their own. Why is it, I wonder, that these so-called “vulnerable” people, who have allegedly suffered so badly at the hands of abusers who “have all the power”, all seem to be so stridently assertive, aggressive, noisy, and, well, incredibly powerful?

Real victims would be better served by resolute police action, not inquiries. Why doesn’t that happen? My suspicion is that the police understand quite well that the only reason “grooming gangs” are such a hot issue is that those who have pushed it to the top of the political agenda are the likes of Elon Musk and Tommy Robinson, whose target is not so much groomers as Muslims, especially Muslim immigrants. The “Muslim grooming gangs” motif hits two hot-button emotive issues at once: Pakis and paedos!

The police have plenty of real work to be doing, some of it against genuine child abuse, including neglect and cruelty (the original focus of the NSPCC), and we are all aware of how bogus abuse work and pursuing ridiculous woke hate-crime complaints has distracted them from real and urgent tasks such as tackling knife crime, county lines, the epidemic of industrial scale shoplifting, having a visible presence at known trouble hotspots before it all kicks off, and upping their game against devastating online scams that can wipe out life savings, to say nothing of major cybercrime: the JLR job alone has threatened thousands of livelihoods and cost the economy billions. The cops should focus on this important stuff, and we (the public) should let them get on with it.

DISLODGING PRINCE ANDREW

Having been forced out of my own home back in the day for no better reason than being unpopular as a MAP, I have some sympathy for Prince Andrew, who is under pressure not just to give up the roof over his head but to banish himself to some other country, just for the “crime” of once having had an unpopular friend, many years ago.

The claim is that he has been sponging off taxpayers by living rent-free for over 20 years at Royal Lodge, Windsor, which is admittedly more “des res” than your average  asylum hotel. But the “sponging” allegation ignores the fact that Andrew’s lease committed him to paying an initial £1 million and spending £7.5 million on refurbishment plus maintaining the house and estate, which must cost a bomb – the grounds alone need four full-time gardeners, and total outdoor costs would be around £150,000 each year, to say nothing of the 30-room building’s upkeep.

A HINT OF HOPE FROM ECUADOR

It is always darkest just before the dawn, as wise man Thomas Fuller observed a few centuries ago. Was he right? I have no idea. I have never checked. But we must hope his metaphorical wisdom works in the case of Marthijn Uittenbogaard and his partner Lesley, the Dutch duo who fled their country’s increasing intolerance against MAP activism only to end up baselessly imprisoned in Ecuador in 2022 under appalling conditions. Their story, starting in the Netherlands, has long been followed by Heretic TOC when there have been major developments. See, especially, here, here, here, and here.

What we must hope was the darkest point, following a long-delayed trial, conviction, 10-year prison sentence and failed appeal, was an awful period this summer when the pair had reduced access to food, leaving them weak and increasingly vulnerable to TB, from which many prisoners were dying. As their compatriot and stalwart supporter Anton Dautzenberg, a famous writer in the Netherlands, put it, “the president of Ecuador thinks that [food] is an unnecessary luxury for the time being”. Last month, though, Dautzenberg brought some more encouraging news:

The men have been moved to another cell. They feel safe there, because they were already friends with two of the three cellmates. Moreover, they finally have access to the prison shop again, the credit (for three months) has been replenished. They also managed to transfer extra money so that the men can purchase vitamins and nutritional supplements. Finally, the process for transfer of sentence to the Netherlands has been set in motion – WOTS, Transfer of Enforcement of Criminal Sentences Act.

I’m not sure what’s WOTS. Maybe it’s an Ecuadoran or Dutch acronym. But the important bit is in bold. They could be coming home to serve the remainder of their sentence. No further news on that yet, but a week ago Dautzenberg reported that things are still going relatively well and that the prison regime has been relaxed somewhat.

THREE NOT-SO-WISE MEN

Less wise, no doubt, than Thomas Fuller, but probably a good deal more interesting to heretics here, are three figures who have been in the news.

Let’s kick off with naughty former Premier League football referee David Coote, who was unwise enough a few years ago to call Liverpool’s manager at the time, Jürgen Klopp, a “German cunt” and “fucking arrogant”. It got him a Red Card that saw him suspended from his job for a while, but that’s not the half of it. He has since been accused of “gambling misconduct”, caught snorting “a white powder through a bank note”, and – here’s the really naughty bit – in possession of child porn. Wow! What  a gloriously colourful badass! Coote’s a hoot!

In January, he came out as gay in an interview with The Sun and said a lifelong struggle to hide his sexuality had contributed to the rant about Klopp. He is reportedly due in court again in December for sentencing in the porn case. Can’t wait to see what excuse he comes up with this time. I suppose it could be, “Sorry, Your Honour, I was off my head on coke while trying to forget about my disastrous gambling losses.” Whatever he tries, good luck to him!

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Next up, someone for whom we may have less sympathy, former Lostprophets singer Ian Watkins, who was found dead earlier this month after being attacked in Wakefield prison. On the face of it, his criminality had been truly awful, as he had been serving a 29-year sentence for a number of child sex offences including “the attempted rape of a fan’s baby”.

We always need to be careful with rape allegations, though, bearing in mind that the word “rape” has been so diluted in meaning. At one time it was confined to forcible penetration of the vagina, which would have been truly horrific in the case of a baby – and perhaps also impossible bearing in mind that a baby’s genitals could not accommodate an adult penis. As for “attempted”, what might that have amounted to? Even gentle rubbing of a penis against a child’s vagina, anus, or mouth with only the very slightest intromission, would legally constitute rape these days, and for a charge of  “attempted” rape to succeed it would be necessary only to show that the accused intended to penetrate the victim and had started relevant preliminaries, such as undressing a child.

What makes me doubt that he ever did anything that would have frightened or hurt a child is that he made little secret of his sexuality, and was able to recruit two women “who donated their babies to him”, as Watkins’ defence barrister Michael Wolkind put it. These women were jailed as well. Also, even though there was video evidence of his “attempted rape of a baby” he did not initially plead guilty. Did he imagine he might be able to persuade a jury, based on this visual record, that he was not guilty of such a serious charge? In the end he changed his plea, doubtless based on legal advice, so no jury ever saw the evidence.

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Our third unwise man drowned after falling into a marina on his way home from a pub. CCTV cameras captured the 66-year-old walking “unsteadily” along a pontoon before falling over a railing and hitting his head, a coroner’s court heard earlier this month. It was not unknown for him to drink two bottles of whisky per day, the inquest heard.

But this wasn’t just any old drunkard. He was also a double murderer who spent 20 years in prison after a difficult childhood and an early life spent as, in his own words, “a liar, a thief and a cheat”. Some say he drank out of remorse, which is believable because in most respects (not the excessive drinking, clearly) he became a reformed character and a distinguished writer.

I refer to Erwin James, who wrote a regular column about prison life for The Guardian while he was still serving his sentence, and who also edited the prisons newspaper Inside Time until 2023. As a Guardian reader back then, I remember reading a number of his articles, and very good they were too.

James wrote about such bullies several times in his columns. In one article, headed “The hypocrisy of prison barbarism”, he wrote:

But who are these self-appointed judges and executioners who take it upon themselves to dish out extra-judicial violence on fellow prisoners of whom they disapprove? Either they are just nasty sanctimonious bullies, so ashamed of their own failings that they prey on anyone they see as more vulnerable than themselves. Or they are inadequate dullards, vulnerable and easily goaded into senseless assaults on strangers by their sharper neighbours, “the chaps” who get their kicks by playing the morally bankrupt “prison code” game. And cowardice always looms large when attacks are being considered. As the wise heads on the landings say, “If a man five feet nothing is convicted of something to do with sex or children he’s a nonce – if he’s over six feet, there might be some doubt about his conviction.”

Exactly! Well said, Erwin, and R.I.P.

James, whose full name was Erwin James Monahan, died in January last year. The Guardian ran an obituary that is worth checking out.

I AM A SURVIVOR

One of the first memories about my own sexuality was in a summer camp. I was 10. Apparently, I was making it so obvious that an older guy yelled, “What are you doing, staring at other boys’ asses!?” Ooops! So, yeah, that was my very first sex education lesson: “You’re not supposed to do that. It’s wrong.” In the camp, there were showers with bamboo screens, which gave less than total privacy because in between the cracks you could get a glimpse of who was inside. One day, word was going around that there were naked women in the showers. Several boys told me about it in great excitement! Since I had a camera, which not many people had at the time, they wanted me to take photos. And I did so despite having no interest in women’s bodies. So at 10 I was already closeted to avoid disappointing my friends’ expectations.

At school, I was the shy nerd. Always trying to avoid conflict. For years, I thought I was the only boy in the world who felt attraction to other boys. At the beginning, having such a secret —”I like boys”… and to be more specific, “I like boys’ asses and dicks”— was arousing. However, years went by, and over the course of my adolescence that fantasy gradually turned into a burden. I repressed myself so much, for so long, that the closet became asphyxiating. I eventually felt the urge to have a real experience. I managed to swallow my shyness and made a few attempts with some acquaintances, but it didn’t work out. Finding peers in a small town is definitely not an easy job for sexual minorities. One day, I observed one of those hand-written notes on a public toilet door: “If you want to suck my dick come here next Tuesday at 6pm.” And that’s exactly what I did. The plan was set: If the guy is hot then enjoy, if the guy is average then just do the job, and if the guy is ugly then run away. The guy turned out to be average for my physical preferences. When he saw me, he made a visible gesture that he was not expecting anyone so young. He hesitated. He asked about my age. I was 17, he was in his 30s. I have never been especially attracted to people much older than me, but I was desperate and he was not ugly enough for me to reject. I suggested doing unsafe sex, but he was kind enough to tell me to play it safe. So, yeah, my first sexual contact was in a blind date with a grown-up.

That experience, though, was not the ultimate relief, since I had been carrying a heavy emotional backpack of repression. The realisation that I spent so many years losing opportunities for real sex while I was isolated in my fantasies was horrible. It is the kind of thought where you realise you have spoiled your time for many years, leading a life that does not represent at all what you wanted to be. This realisation was so disturbing that I entered a depression phase in which I made several suicide attempts. The first time I put my fingers to the wall socket; nothing happened except having a fright. The second time I randomly swallowed pills from the medicine cabinet, which ended with my mum dragging me to the hospital while struggling to keep me conscious. So, yeah, I am a survivor. I mean, literally. It was actually at the hospital bed when I came out to my parents. I later got psychiatric help for depression. The only options I was seeing were either to keep hiding myself like a rat and lose opportunities for real sex, or to come out as a faggot and see how everyone rejects me. What a dilemma! You have to understand that, at the time, homosexuality was a taboo and we still were considered deviants. The American Psychiatric Association considered it a mental disorder. Happily, my therapist helped me reconcile with myself and look forward to a new future. After that, at the age of 19, I felt free to open the Pandora’s box of my sexuality. I suddenly quit my summer job and my parents’ place to move to the big city! This is where I had my first kiss. Yay! I also became a sex worker for over a year, which in my case was an act of rebellion against society (and, of course, also a means to pay for my bills after such an abrupt emancipation). The city can be a liberating experience, but it also has its dark side. One night, I was beaten up by a group of young men after they saw me holding hands with a guy, leaving my face badly bruised.

As a young adult, I got actively involved in the gay movement, being among the first to come out in my region, enrolling as an ILGA member, getting involved in politics, engaging with local associations, and so on. It was in one of these groups that I started a row that ended up with its dissolution, because I wanted it to condemn paedophilia after pressures from the local council to do so. I behaved like a demon, a fanatic, led by hysteria and fear. I know, I know… What a hypocrite I was! But there’s more. This story has only just started.

I’ve always had, and still have, many fulfilling sexual relationships with adults. One day, someone texted me on Grindr. Blank profile. He disappeared and reappeared with a new profile over the course of several weeks, maybe months. We eventually had a proper online conversation. I let him take the initiative without pressure. He was looking for a sex encounter and he had a very clear idea about what he wanted to do in bed. It was a very specific fantasy. To be honest, he was so lovely and sexy in his Instagram that I had a crush. He told me he was 13, about to turn 14. OMG. What should I do? Oh no! The Ghost of the Dilemmas reappeared again. I could either repress myself and lose the opportunity to enjoy a very desired experience, or take the risk of going to jail and being labelled as a “paedo” for the rest of my life. I then decided to take legal advice. Rest assured, I will never forget that consultation. After entering her office, I set the scene, saying that teenagers use dating apps looking for sexual encounters, and I happened to have an interest in someone, and the interest was mutual. She asked about “her” age —she assumed I was talking about a girl— and I answered. After some hesitation, she said, I quote, “…up to 16 years old… Hmmm… No.” Which obviously begged the question, “What about 16 to 18 years old, then?” She replied, “Hmmm… Still no.” WTF!!?? Sounded like a bad joke. She then asked my age. When I told her she reacted like, “Oh my goodness!”. There are times when facial expression tells you way more than words. She slowly shook her head in disapproval. She stared at me in reproof as if I were a criminal. A disgusting monster. A predator. I was sex shamed. Her attitude was so obvious that I reacted, “Look, I have no interest at all in your moral beliefs, I just came here looking for legal advice.” There was a lot of tension in the room. She replied, “OK, OK” and I left angrily.

I eventually decided not to meet the boy, which has been one of the toughest decisions I have ever faced. It felt like cutting off my own limb. Emotionally excruciating. I mentally collapsed. It left me with a series of anxiety crises for over a year, for which I required treatment. Yes, again. Fortunately, my anxiety is completely over these days. But, why did I decide not to meet the youngster? To be continued…

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Your regular heretic resumes below the photo…

HOW HOT IS ‘BLUE FILM’?

Debuted at Edinburgh International Film Festival, Blue Film has been touted as the most controversial movie of the year, but you wouldn’t mistake it for any of Bonnie Blue’s work.

Reviewers tell us it is mainly just talk rather than sex. But, as one of the main characters has been to prison for involvement with a 12-year-old boy, and the portrayal could be seen as sympathetic, we can see why it might be a hot potato.

So, is it any good? I didn’t go to Edinburgh to see it, but we can glean a lot from the reviews. Damon Wise sets the scene well at a movie site called Deadline:

The opening sequence is a lot; [Kieron] Moore plays Aaron Eagle, who is what they apparently call a “camboy”, basically an online male escort who taunts his submissive gay audience with his jacked, tattooed body and sexually loaded insults. All he’s wearing is a pair of white briefs, but the hidden booty of what’s inside gets the cash registers ringing. Aaron is pretty good as this, and the money is flowing in. But even by his own flush standards he’s about to strike gold: an anonymous fan has offered to pay him $50,000 for an overnight stay, and, much to the fan’s surprise, he’s taking him up on the offer.

We see this when the man, wearing a balaclava, opens the door to his single-use Airbnb and finds Aaron on the doorstep with his overnight bag. Aaron is good to go, but the man has other plans, insisting that his guest sit down first for an extensive  video interview. It becomes pretty clear that this mysterious stranger knows a lot more about Aaron than he has bargained for, chipping away at his cultivated but clearly fake identity in ways that leave him vulnerable — and angry. From this point on, it’s impossible to discuss the film without revealing what could be construed as a major plot point, though instead of a spoiler alert, it may be fairer to call it a trigger warning.

Well, we’re not going to be “triggered” here, I trust! The big reveal comes when the stranger takes off his balaclava (a disguise described in other reviews as a ski mask, but no matter). That’s when Aaron discovers this is no stranger at all. It’s Hank Grant (Reed Birney), one of his old middle school teachers. This is in the US, where middle-school pupils are typically 11 to 14. Hank was fired for the “attempted sexual assault”, whatever that might mean, of a 12-year-old student.

I’m guessing there was nothing rapacious. Probably more like a rejected pass, judging by where writer-director Elliot Tuttle tells us he is coming from. Tuttle wrote the script while thinking about a fantasy from his own time at middle school: “I really wanted my history teacher to have sex with me,” he says. Cool!

Hank admits he was attracted to the schoolboy version of Aaron. As for why he has brought his old student back into his life, more than a decade later, he says, “I want to know if I still love you.” Eventually, they are seen being physically intimate together.

As a review in Vanity Fair puts it, the topic is especially radioactive “amid the swirling Epstein files saga”, adding, “Its insistence on pushing boundaries is completely at odds with an industry terrified of controversy and scrambling to simply stay afloat.”

Tuttle agrees but also pushes back: “Trump is ushering in this cultural conservatism that I think forces the queer community and gay tastemakers to really present one view of queerness that is kind of immune to critique…and, to me, pretty boring and not in the tradition of being a queer artist…. People are hungry for something that is not so limited by what’s tasteful.”

So far, so good. It sounds as though this director, in his first feature-length film, has made a brave effort to challenge the timidity of both the movie industry and the “respectable” so-called gay community, which often seems even less communally minded and tolerant of difference these days than society at large.

Sadly, though, we are given grounds to suspect that timidity has triumphed in the end. At some point the respectability police have managed to scuttle Tuttle. My guess is that Hank’s firing for “attempted assault” was a late change in the script, because neither the industry nor the two main actors want to risk being associated with a different Hank – a Hank whose relationship with the 12-year-old was one of mutual love rather than assault, “attempted” or otherwise.

The actors, producers and all involved would have surmised that such a scenario would have seen the film tarred as a bid to “legitimise paedophilia”, to a degree that could not plausibly be denied. So, they had to make Hank pretty much a “virtuous” paedophile who strayed only marginally from the straight and narrow, backing off after a rejected pass.

Nevertheless, Blue Film may be worth seeing. Like most indie films, especially controversial ones, it is unlikely ever to reach many (or even any) cinema screens, but we must hope at some point it becomes available for online viewing.

EPSTEIN: AM I MISSING SOMETHING?

Headline in The Times: “Paedophile’s assistant ‘sat on Queen’s throne’ during private tour”.

LOL! Bonkers, isn’t it? It conjures up an alternative reality in which “assistant paedophile” is a routine job you’ll see advertised at your local Jobcentre. Wouldn’t that be interesting?

Of course, it has to be a Jeffrey Epstein story, the “assistant” being a 22-year-old woman who lavished praise on the guy in a birthday book made for him before his fall from grace, saying how he had given her a great time, bringing opportunities she would never otherwise have had, meeting famous people such as Bill Clinton, Kevin Spacey, Prince Andrew and Donald Trump – to say nothing of getting to sit  in the monarch’s seat  at Buckingham Palace.

What struck me about this story, apart from the bizarre headline’s display of the paedophobic, paedomanic lunacy into which the anglophone world has sunk, is that the media must surely be finding it harder and harder to keep insisting Epstein is a monster. Why?  Because we are hearing from more and more people who have said behind the scenes what a nice guy he was!

The testimony of this understandably starstruck young woman from an ordinary background is particularly interesting and important because it tells an entirely different story to those of his alleged victims, at least one of whom, Virginia Giuffre, was a proven fantasist at best, while others have stood to gain financially from their narratives of alleged trauma – millions have been paid in compensation to say nothing of media fees for their stories.

What we are also hearing now, though, is similar praise for Epstein from his elite friends, notably Peter Mandelson, recently sacked as the UK’s ambassador to the US, and Sarah Ferguson, Prince Andrew’s former wife. Both of them speak of him with extraordinary warmth, giving us good reason to believe they were speaking from the heart. Unlike the “assistant”, their testimony is also important because they were high status people with no reason to be sycophantic towards him. Yes, they might have been helped by loans from him, but they did not need to grovel or be so effusive.

So far, I have to say, I have seen nothing to suggest that Epstein was anything other than a nice guy. As a socialist, I have no fondness for billionaires, especially those (most of them) who are greedy, mean and go out of their way to dodge taxes. But why is Epstein singled out as a monster? I mean, that young lady we started with, he literally treated her like a queen! I have no idea where this “monster” thing is coming from. Am I missing something?

Wow! I don’t know which is more impressive, the sheer durability of the lady’s lady parts or the men’s required shagging speed, given that on average they would have had no more than 40 seconds each. Even British guys, notorious for premature ejaculation, might have been hard pressed to get the job done.  Tia, professional name Bonnie Blue, said the actual number was 1,057 men because there were 57 still in the queue before the 12-hour time period was up, and she didn’t want to disappoint them. Isn’t that sweet? “I’m basically a community worker”, she says, and her conscientious approach suggests she is a very good one.

She isn’t picky either, accepting anyone “from barely legal to barely breathing”. At the daring “barely legal” end of the range she has done special sessions for students aged 18 upwards, and you have to think she would be happy to invite minors of any age, too, if she could get away with it. After all, she says her own active sex life started at 13 and she doesn’t regret it. She has also said she wants to do a session for the disabled and disadvantaged, including those with Down syndrome. It all makes her a paragon of diversity, equity and inclusion, so what’s not to like?

Well, you will not be surprised to hear she has no shortage of critics of her “immoral”, “depraved”, “end of days”, etc. performances. Feminist philosopher Kathleeen Stock, writing in UnHerd, was among the naysayers. Inevitably, the commercial aspect came into her critique. Bonnie’s “gimmick”, she said, was to have sex on camera “with what she calls ‘normal men’, not porn stars, then make subscribers pay to watch”. Gotta love that sly “make”! The implication seems to be that Bonnie illicitly groomed these hitherto innocent subscribers, manipulatively cheating them out of their pocket money! Quite a lot of pocket money, as it turns out. She reveals to the documentary team who followed and filmed her life and performances that her earnings were up to £2 million for the most recent month.

Did the punters get value for money? The gangbang sex action is much too speedy to include sophisticated sexual gymnastics but that’s not the point. Stock is closer to the mark with the word “gimmick”. Bonnie is offering something new, something you wouldn’t get from the professional porn stars. The most appealing aspect of this from a MAP point of view is a lovely provocation in which Bonnie sets up a “lesson” (presumably “sex education” but the documentary steers clear of that) with a class of “pupils” in school uniform. Barely legal? Looks more like pre-legal. The “schoolkids” in question are indeed of age though. They were recruited from young OnlyFans content makers, this being the platform Bonnie herself used until she was banned for violating a rule against “extreme challenges”.  We are introduced to one of these young performers, who says she is 22 but could easily pass for 12.

Stock tells us that the day after seeing the Bonnie documentary she went to give a speech at an annual summer school run in memory of conservative philosopher Sir Roger Scruton. She wrote:

We don’t really need to wonder what Roger Scruton would have thought about all of this, because in 1986 he wrote a book called Sexual Desire which told us. In it, he sketched a Platonic ideal of sexual arousal: of erotic desire involving mutual recognition and communication of pleasure between you and your partner, ecstatically directed towards an irreplaceable particular person in all their specificity, rather than towards a mere selection of body parts, or some pictures on a screen. Sexual desire in this ideal state is individualising, not objectifying; it is a “cooperative enterprise” between two people, discovering new aspects of the mysterious other; it is sacred and full of awe. It is the absolute opposite of hundreds of men standing in boxer shorts and balaclavas, waiting for a few seconds of bodily contact with a woman they have never met; or of thousands of spectators, home alone with credit cards out and flies unzipped.

I have read Scruton’s Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation, to give the  full title. It is a dense, difficult, 438-page tome that I have studied in depth and critiqued in an academic paper. Briefly, I am not impressed. The trouble with the idea of sex as “sacred” is the narrowness of the morality to which it leads. Scruton was a homophobic bigot who loved nothing more (except perhaps seeing animals torn apart in blood sports) than discerning “obscenity” and “perversion” in any erotic deviation from his ideal standard and denouncing those engaged in such alleged sexual transgressions as “vile” or “disgusting”.

Superficially, the idea of restricting sex to loving, committed relationships is attractive. Commitment is certainly a bedrock requirement for bringing up kids. They need stable homes, and it helps when parents love each other as well as them. But the mistake is to sanctify sex as a binding factor, a holy sacrament. Scruton’s writing is secular, but his tone is religious, and his thinking sits well with Christianity’s traditional suspicion of sex (a flame that must be extinguished where possible and sanctified when it cannot) from St Paul onwards. Sex therapist Olivia Fane has put her finger right on love’s missing G spot:

Sex is not about souls. We have sexual desire when we want to have sex, not when we love someone. If that wasn’t the case, it would be the oldies who were all having rampant sex after 40 years of a happy marriage, who’d be the writers of agony columns advising those poor young people how being kind and considerate and bringing a cup of tea to their partner in bed will really get the pulse racing.

Lust, as opposed to love, is often despised for its supposed baseness and animality. But why? It is not self-sacrificing, as love is; but it is not inevitably nasty and selfish either. Just because you have an intense desire for someone’s body does not mean you have no regard for their rights and feelings. Your attitude depends on other feelings you have, which may well include kindness and goodwill.

And even love is not beyond criticism. As philosopher Harry Lesser has pointed out, “Genuine love can have a very selfish element – a desire to control and dominate another person spiritually in ways that are much more exploitative than the mere temporary use of his or her body.” (quoted in Ethics and Sex, by Igor Primoratz).

Three cheers for Bonnie Blue then?  Not quite. Sure, she’s a breath of fresh air for barely breathing old-timers like me; and she offers a ray of sunshine for barely legal youngsters. Boys, especially, hear little except victim feminism’s depressing, demoralising, incessant drumbeat of puritanical drivel telling them sex is a poisoned chalice, and males are just a bunch of harassers and potential rapists. It’s great that Bonnie’s message is much more pleasure-positive and pro-male. So why deny her that third cheer?

If it were just about Bonnie, I wouldn’t hesitate to award all three. But it isn’t, because commending her work without identifying any downside would be to ignore a deplorable and dangerous aspect of the social media platforms, where she and other online celebrities compete for the viewing figures on which their fame and fortune depend. While competition is usually a good thing in commerce, driving the innovation that gives us useful product improvements and brilliant new inventions, the online attention economy has become notorious for generating extremism. In the battle to win the views, and keep ahead of the game, performers find they need to come up with new stuff all the time. And all too often the most obvious way of doing that is to repeat the winning formula but take it to the next level. If someone has shagged 10 guys in a gangbang video, you do a hundred. And when they’ve done a hundred, you whack it up to a thousand.

No big deal, you might say. Nobody is forced to take on that level of challenge. It’s an expression of personal freedom. We should celebrate that, along with the opportunity to make enough money to obtain lasting security and a decent standard of living. What worried me more, though, was when we heard about Bonnie’s latest proposed stunt. She would put herself naked in a glass box on public display in what she calls a “petting zoo”, inviting anyone passing by to do anything they wanted to her. Anything? We didn’t see the small-print T&Cs, but the documentary footage appeared to suggest people might be allowed to hit her. The project looks so reckless we have to wonder where it will all end. Bonnie tells us she gets death threats daily, hundreds of them. Her biggest fear is an acid attack.

Again, we might say it’s her face, her life, her decision. Much as we would be horrified to see her suffer a truly vicious, life-changing assault, personal freedom is not lightly to be curtailed just to keep us all safe. That would be to set us on a life-denying course that would soon rule out everything from rough contact sports to crewed space exploration.

We might, however, feel it is time to tackle the attention economy’s perverse incentive to produce ever more sensational and all too often harmful online content.

Some of those harms, to be sure, we should simply learn to live with, such as people suffering offence from so-called “hate speech”.  Being able to let off steam in strong language is an indispensable aspect of free expression in a democracy. Not that abusive language is conducive to reasonable discussion leading to deeper understanding. It isn’t. Which is why I won’t put up with it when moderating the comments here at Heretic TOC. If people want to be rude to each other, let them do that on Twitter/X or in a heated exchange at Wetherspoons.

Also, for fans here of OnlyFans and other mainstream “adult” content online, I think we can agree that tackling online “harms” should not include making it harder or impossible to visit such sites, including Pornhub and others. The UK’s Online Safety Act has rightly been under severe attack recently for having exactly this effect. When new age verification rules came into effect late last month, Reform UK called the Act a “dystopian” measure that would drive youngsters towards VPN use and take them a step closer to accessing the dark web. The first part of that prediction came true immediately with a dramatic rise in VPN usage. I suspect Reform leader Nigel Farage has shrewdly judged that plenty of adults of all ages will be turning to VPNs rather than giving details that risk revealing their identities when proving their age. It looks like a massive vote winner for him over the whole age range of the electorate, especially now that Labour has promised votes for 16-year-olds.

Labour’s desperation to avoid giving Reform a huge boost is to be seen in their aggressive language, with tech secretary Peter Kyle and others saying Farage must be a friend of paedophiles if he is against the Act. That would have come as news to Nigel, I’m sure! But Labour have been hoist with their own ultra-feminist, anti-porn petard. Their parliamentary and government ranks are crammed with killjoy ideologues. These “social purity” warriors have been itching for decades to close down all porn outlets, not just ones that give access to minors. The age verification scheme enabled them to bring that a step nearer, while hiding, as ever, behind child protection as an excuse.

But this is the easy stuff to talk about, the stuff we can agree on here. So what about the real harms the big platforms are failing to deal with, evidently because the unimpeded attention economy, with its algorithms that incentivise extreme content, is the only thing the greedy capitalist tech moguls care about? How else are sites to be brought to heel when they  permit really bad stuff, if not by something like the Online Safety Act? Stuff such as material that features and facilitates eating disorders including anorexia, plus self-harm, including horrific mutilation by cutting, and the promotion of suicide? Stuff that is  targeted at teenagers? And as if all that were not bad enough, the latest in the news this week has been sites featuring kittens being tortured and killed. I will not be checking to see if such sites really exist (I couldn’t bear to look), but I doubt anyone is going to tell me it is just an urban legend.

In her attack on Bonnie Blue’s work, Kathleen Stock focuses on something rather less extreme but also disturbing for some of us. She notes that Bonnie is a “big fan of being choked”. I worry that this dangerous practice is becoming increasingly common among young people, and my guess is that the online world has done much to make it fashionable – with guys at least; not so much among girls, I would think. Bonnie said it was just a matter of being vocal about consent. Stock again:

But having to read out an ever-growing list of internet-approved acts you positively don’t want to participate in, every time you get into the bedroom, does not seem to me a liberating state of affairs for anyone. And for every future dead, strangled daughter who once watched a Bonnie Blue video — or whose sex partner did — it won’t be much consolation for her family to think she nominally had a choice.

While I do not think the practice is a matter to be choked off, as it were, by restrictive legislation, I do feel Stock has a point on this one.

As for whether the Online Safety Act is overall a good thing or not, I find myself in the unusual position of agreeing with Farage: the age verification strategy is terrible and needs to be dropped. I find it much easier to support the government’s aim of discouraging self-harm, etc., sites, but whether the Act is the right vehicle for that is extremely doubtful. The government’s stated aim of cracking down on material that is judged harmful but not illegal looks like guaranteeing the law will be applied with oppressive overreach. But we need to see how it works in practice over the next year or two.

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A MAGA MYSTERY IS EXPLAINED

Researching Michael Jackson, as I did for many years while working on my book about him, I didn’t find it difficult to get a handle on his psychology. Many found him deeply puzzling, an unfathomable enigma. But to me (and I’m sorry if it sounds arrogant or overconfident to say this) his heart and mind were an open book. His family background explained much; and, as I shared his attraction to young boys, it was much easier for me to understand this than it would have been for your average writer on pop music or celebrity culture.

What I have found much tougher in recent years to understand has been Americans’ weakness for bizarre conspiracy theories that cast paedophiles as a hidden elite, malignly running the deep state. It surfaced in 2016 with Pizzagate, when top Democrats including Hillary Clinton were alleged to be running a child sex ring involving a  pizzeria in Washington, DC. QAnon soon followed this up with related allegations.

Now the situation had morphed to a MAGA obsession with Jeffrey Epstein, a theme that at least has the merit of not being a total fantasy. Epstein was a real person, who had an undoubted interest (like literally billions of other males) in teenage girls, and he was an elite figure with elite friends. However, he was nowhere near to being “a paedophile”, as traditionally defined, i.e. having a primary or exclusive sexual attraction to prepubescent children, so his lifestyle can hardly be taken as evidence that paedos are in control of everything (or anything). But that is a detail that doesn’t interest the MAGA folks.

It has all seemed completely bonkers and incomprehensible to me. Until now. In an article called “Critical Pedo Theory: Understanding one of the core tenets of the modern American Right”, Scott Greer explains everything. He is on the Right himself, being a contributor to The American Conservative, and is no fan of paedophilia. But just as it sometimes takes a paedo (me) to know one (Jackson), Greer knows the Right from within, and I find his explanations convincing. You can see his full article here, but you can get the gist from an extract:

This issue is important to much of the Right due to the belief in “Critical Pedo Theory.” This notion imagines that the world is ruled by a pedophile cabal and “systemic pedophilia” is inherent to the current order. These elite pedos are evil by nature, which is why they use space lasers to cause forest fires and wield their weather machine against red states. These right-wingers hoped Trump would battle the cabal as president. QAnoners thought he did so in his first term, clinging to fake news stories about the admin secretly arresting and executing prominent child molesters.

The Epstein announcement came as a shock. Here’s their leader telling them that a core element of their worldview isn’t true. Rather than follow Trump’s advice and move on, they’re up in arms, with some threatening to ditch MAGA altogether. It illustrates how fundamental CPT is to a large cohort of conservatives. Trump bombing Iran and implying he may be open to some form of amnesty didn’t elicit anywhere near this kind of backlash from his base. For a significant number of Trump voters, the pedo cabal matters more than anything else.

Critical Pedo Theory emerged in the mid-2010s. It gained credence as a response to the Left. For years, liberals would condemn right-wingers as racists. Racism is one of the great taboos in American society. The other is pedophilia, so right-wingers began calling leftists kid diddlers to defang racism accusations. The Right’s embrace of conspiratorial populism transformed this rhetoric into CPT. Conservatives were no longer just calling the Left pedos to defend against racism smears – they now concocted an entire worldview centered on pedo cabals. Pizzagate and QAnon soon followed.

Further on, Greer briefly highlights how the definition of paedophilia has been stretched:

Age gap relationship hysteria demonstrates the strength of the taboo around pedophilia. Women now call men who date younger women pedophiles, despite both parties being adults, because they know it’s the worst label one can receive. They hope it will shame men into dating women their own age.

I am sure he is right about this, but there is much more to be said on the subject. One writer who delves much deeper into it is another figure on the Right, Richard Hanania, a buddy of JD Vance. His article has the merit of drawing on an evolutionary perspective. Here’s a brief taster:

There’s been a cultural shift over the last two decades in how we think about human sexuality, one in which we’ve simply lost touch with biological realities. The idea that teenage boys can be victimized by older women, like the demand that men only be attracted to women of their own age, can only exist in a culture in which many aspects of heterosexuality are repressed, if not demonized.

WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE?

Sentences in England and Wales (and probably the rest of the UK) for “sex offences against children” have more than tripled in length in the 30 years since the mid-1990s, according to an AI trawl through Ministry of Justice figures. Back then the average was just under two years whereas now it is over six.

This will come as no surprise to those of us who have been around long enough to see the long-term trend emerging from a steady stream of cases reported in the media over the years, and who have seen new laws brought in to increase maximum penalties.

It is possible that much of this upward trajectory has been on a smoothly rising curve, but what catches the eye is the occasional case when a judge goes mad and suddenly takes draconian sentencing to a whole new level, taking us ever closer to the US “carceral state” model . That is what happened a couple of months ago in the case of leading LGBTQ+ activist Stephen Ireland, co-founder of Pride in Surrey, when he was given a whopping sentence of 24 years for the “rape” of a 12-year-old boy, along with related lesser offences.

Had it been a real rape Ireland would have had little cause for complaint when we bear in mind that rape carries a maximum life sentence. But it was plain that the boy had been actively seeking out sex with men – he met Ireland through the gay hookup app Grindr, for fuck’s sake (literally!) – and that in a sane world there would have been no prison sentence at all for this de facto consensual encounter. The kid even lied about his age in his bid to get laid, initially telling Ireland he was 17. Jurors heard that Ireland described him in a message to his partner as a boy who “wants to play with men’s bodies”.

But in flat contradiction of the obvious fact that the boy was up for it, Judge Patricia Lees claimed Ireland “took advantage” of “a vulnerable child”. Instead of admitting the boy was highly sexed, just like almost every male adolescent, this presumably feminist judge chose to put her own spin on it by describing him as “highly sexualised”. In other words, his sexuality was somehow not his own but the result (as she explicitly speculated, without evidence) of prior “grooming”.

In my view, this is one of the most egregious cases of unjust sentencing since Oscar Wilde was sent down 130 years ago after one of the first celebrity trials. As Wilde was one of the great literary figures of his day, it was to be expected that the trial outcome would be a public sensation, attracting huge publicity.

Ireland’s fame is nothing like as great, but he was a flamboyant, high-profile figure in Surrey and it is striking that his lengthy incarceration has not generated much of a public response from the LGBTQ+ community. Where is the shocked reaction? Where are the placards and protest marches? All we’ve had is a stunned and possibly embarrassed silence. What a sad and sorry sign of the times that is!

DON’T DISMISS DAWKINS

Late last year, and in January this year, Heretic TOC did a two-part blog, the first called “Time to get real: woke is broke”, the second being “Clearing up the conceptual confusion”. The first looked at how woke identity politics, especially on trans issues, may have cost the Democrats the US presidential election and ushered in a second Trump term. Part two examined the conceptual muddle that had allowed such dubious politics to thrive.

My intention, as I said at the time, was to unravel some knotty conceptual areas of confusion, not to trash the trans cause but, among other things, to strengthen it by giving it a foundation grounded in reality rather than the ridiculous and dangerous fantasies then being peddled by extremist activists.

This second part was the most difficult, intellectually challenging blog I have ever done, but I am in no doubt it was worth the effort, not least as regards investigating the non-binary aspect of sexuality. Note that I say “sexuality”, not sex. What I argued was that gender is non-binary (and so is our sexuality as individuals) but that sex is not. Sex is strictly binary, and we get into all manner of difficulties if we try to ignore or obscure this fundamental fact.

Now, I am delighted to report, the legendary evolutionary biologist and science communicator Richard Dawkins has given us a new essay on the subject that explains it all with far more authority and eloquence than I could muster. Dawkins is something of a hate figure on the woke left, rather like JK Rowling. This is unfortunate in both cases, but especially that of Dawkins, whose values are civilised and humane and who, above all, really knows his stuff. Accordingly, I would invite everyone to check out his new essay in UnHerd.

No hiding place for MAPs in AI future

I recently had an interesting—and disquieting—experience on Instagram thanks to its new-ish AI system designed to detect alleged instances of “child exploitation” across its multitude of channels. This is something that should concern all MAPs, as well as everyone who uses social forums like Instagram and TikTok to advance certain business models. In fact, it may constitute an eventual game-changer for MAPs in society, but not without a lot of chaos and challenges for us prior to that.

THE PERILS OF ADMIRING YOUTHFUL BEAUTY

As all who have known me in the MAP community (and real life) are aware, I have always been a fully law-abiding MAP. I try hard to be a good and generous person to everyone I know, but fall short at times due to the natural human imperfections we all possess. My apologies to all who have had to deal with my more difficult side.

I have chosen to be open to varying degrees about my attractions (which are largely hebephilic) to others, but I do not trumpet the info, especially not with those I have been acquainted with for too short a time to get to know and trust me as a person. I generally steer clear of all interactions with underaged youths (I am attracted to girls only), particularly in one-on-one situations, to avoid finger-pointing or unwarranted accusations or assumptions. I am well aware of how deeply the hatred and fear of MAPs remains in our society, and I never underestimate that fact and the potential dangers it places me in.

So, like most law-abiding MAPs, I am forced to admire girls from afar only, and in entirely legal fashion. That means eschewing even the consideration of seeking illegal CP and instead consigning myself to entirely audio-visual admiration of girls that appear in a plethora of modelling and dance videos, and sometimes personal channels, on commonly viewed social media forums. Parents and professional companies moderate and control these channels in almost all cases, and there is a lucrative market for girls modelling dance and other outfits for companies in pictorial sets or vids commonly referred to by the girls as “try-on hauls”. But some girls commonly upload such vids to YouTube themselves.

As an admirer of girls’ beauty and personalities alike, I have looked at such legal pics and vids that you often come across on these channels even when you are not searching for them specifically. Like all viewers, I have at times “liked” some of them and added some to a “favourites” folder included on your account. I never send DMs or leave comments, salacious or otherwise (the majority of the former often being left by trolls rather than actual MAPs). I make sure to choose a screen name and avatar that is nondescript and does not make my age or appearance clear so that I do not in any way disturb the moderation team or girls promoted within, and so as to remain a respectful, non-troublesome “face in the crowd”.

One would think that means I am not an issue. But the AI system installed to replace the human “paedo hunters” on Instagram has apparently decided otherwise. My account was recently suspended for simply looking at various common and entirely legal modelling, dance, and personal channels there featuring girls, and doing nothing more than “liking” some of the pics and vids or adding them to my “favourites”.

Yes, you read that right. The automatic notice I received explained that “our technology has determined that you violated our community standards against child exploitation”. Huh? And another automated notice said, “Our technology has determined that you may have come across and seen child pornography,” and left me a confidential number to call some counsellor to talk about it. Huh?! WTF?!

How broadly, exactly, are they defining “child pornography” and “child exploitation” these days? Are they implying this is based not on the images themselves but what I may have been thinking while viewing entirely legal and very common pics and vids you find all over these social forums?

Since the great majority of MAPs are law-abiding and confine the expression of their attractions to private admiration of the beauty and attractiveness of youth from afar, this was all I had and all I ever actually did. And… there is now technology designed to detect and thwart that? The hatred has gone so far that surveillance and “prevention” has increased to this extent?

WHAT IT ALL MEANS – SO BE PREPARED

Here is something my recent experience with the AI-driven “paedo hunting” of Instagram has made clear for the future of MAPs. I think an interesting crossroads is coming up for the MAP community.

With the current moral panic against the ever-broadening conception of “child exploitation” and adults who find under-agers attractive still at an all-time high, combined with the rapid advancement of AI “detection” algorithms, we’re soon going to reach a point where it becomes virtually impossible for any MAP to hide our attraction status from public detection. And also to steer clear of technology-driven censure simply for the crime of looking and having forbidden thoughts regarding legal and commonly available imagery. Unless one stays completely off the grid, so to speak.

If you look at certain perfectly legal and commonly uploaded pics and vids on any social media forum – Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter/X, you name it – the system’s AI algorithms will sniff you out and collect data on you based on your viewing habits, your “likes” and “favourites” of certain pics or vids, your level of re-watch, etc.

The system will know, and then the human administration will know. And in short order, the government will know, since they’re now fully in bed with tech corporations. You’ll be further tracked from there, and you’ll be integrated into an official database where most MAPs across the world (or, at least living in the WEIRD part of the world) will be listed.

And since all data is now being collected on all citizens by big tech companies like Palantir, you’ll be cross-referenced between all these forums and every other place online that you frequent. Soon your entire social circle, your job, your main places of product purchase, etc., will be easily available to government agencies, NGOs, merchants whom you do business with, and employers. You will also possibly be reported to law enforcement agents for monitoring and “pre-crime” deterrence procedures. You can easily be blackmailed due to the extreme dangers of being “outed” as someone attracted to underaged youths in the current climate, including public shaming. And ample “character evidence” will be available for everyone to toss at you, from political opponents to employment agencies to law enforcement looking for targets.

It will now become almost impossible to “hide in plain sight” any longer, because our digital shadow will enable the corporate and government tech alliance to find us all out.

So, the days of no one save for perhaps a few trusted people with whom you share this ultra-sensitive info about yourself will be over. This will constitute a revolution of sorts for both our community and for society as a whole to reckon with.

WHAT MAY BE THE END RESULT?

Let’s look on the plus side to the coming full disclosure of MAPs in WEIRD society via advances in AI technology.  Yes, there may actually be one.

At first, this mass technological detection will be promoted as a way of identifying “child predators” – or those who are “potentially” so – and lauded as a safety screen for underaged youths (who are still without anything resembling a voice in society). The public will, of course, eat it up… at least initially. “Now we’re gonna know who all the predators are!” some politician or MAP-hating vigilante will proclaim.

But here is what they are not considering: This revelation will also make clear how many MAPs in society there actually are, how many of them hold important positions, and how many are known as good people.

And how many of them have no criminal records and are law-abiding despite looking at pics and having thoughts that society is conditioned to find “creepy” and potentially “dangerous”.

It will also bring to attention the fact that those seeking to promote the personal brands of (largely) girl models, dancers, and influencers – including many of the parents and companies who help promote them – are quite aware of how attractive youths, particularly young girls, happen to be and how much this helps sell fashion and self-care products, not to mention one’s personal brand.

They promote this in an “open but hidden” fashion, which garners them a lot of much-needed views. This in turn is something which the algorithms pick up on and add for further promotion to more eyes of interest. However, they will now soon be seeing a large segment of their viewing audience paying a huge price for helping this business model along with their mass number of views and “likes”.

Will there be a public outcry to eliminate such channels entirely, or place them fully under the regulation of some law-enforcing government agency? What will that do for the business model, or the type of control that parents usually want above and beyond the government? Will parents and companies who promote these channels for profit via popular clothing and self-care lines be vilified for using imagery that effectively sells and promotes?

It will also make clear to the general public how many people they love, trust, and respect are MAPs that are attracted to underaged youths. People who have saved the lives of many, who have always been there for them through thick and thin, who have earned their trust in many ways; and most importantly, whom they know for a fact are not sociopathic monsters that have ever harmed a kid or lack the self-control to remain law-abiding.

How much can you continue hating MAPs and seeing their natural (and unasked for) attractions as constituting an evil character flaw or depraved sickness when they are your beloved and respected parent, or sibling, or lover, or best friend; or doctor or firefighter who saved the life of you or a loved one?

Or that good-natured neighbour you’ve known and respected your entire life? Or that teacher who provided you with words of wisdom that got you through life’s travails without ever having tried to use or exploit you in any way?

What happens then? Will this algorithm-driven revelation technology backfire in the end? Will it inadvertently serve to compel MAPs forced into public view and scrutiny to develop a loud voice for themselves? How will youths who happen to be mesophiles (attracted to the middle-aged)* react to this?

And will those outside the MAP community who love, respect, and trust us be forced to drop their silence or their own (often performance-driven) indulgence in MAP-bashing?

What will the now devastated youth liberation movement do in reaction to this, especially since the fear of MAPs caused the moderates among their ranks to all but torpedo the movement?

Let us see how this all plays out once almost everyone who happens to be a MAP becomes as well known in the near future as vanilla LGBTQs are today.

Scary – but doubtless interesting – times lay ahead.

* In the study of micro-organisms such as bacteria , a mesophile is an organism that grows best in moderate temperatures. This term is not new. As applied to humans, though, mesophilia is a very recent addition to the lexicon, having first appeared in “The Puzzle of Male Chronophilias“, a paper by psychologist Michael C. Seto published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior in 2016. Seto uses the term to describe people of any age, including youth, whose sexual attraction is focused on middle-aged persons. The word is derived from the Greek root mesos, meaning intermediate. Seto says in the paper that the existence and relative prevalence of mesophilia are hinted at by the popularity of the MILF (for “Moms I’d Like to Fuck”) genre in pornography, and by the existence also of DILF porn. Many would be horrified by the idea that some minors are especially attracted to middle-aged people, which probably accounts for the paucity of research into mesophilia: it may be seen as just too hot to handle. The term is new but there is no reason to believe the phenomenon is: some youngsters have probably always been turned on by older people.

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BACK TO YOUR REGULAR HOST…

THEY ALL LOVE ‘GROOMING GANGS’

So “grooming gangs” are back in the headlines. We may loathe the sexual negativity baked into the construct, to say nothing of the racism typically entailed; but as a cliché much beloved by the hacks, the pols, and the rioting classes, it ain’t going away anytime soon.

Not even with the world exploding into lethal nightly firework displays over cities from Kiev to Tehran (obscuring the dozens of Palestinians still being killed almost daily in Gaza) was the topic forgotten onboard British prime minister Keir Starmer’s flight to the G7 summit in Alberta, Canada, when he was asked by the media whether he would be reversing his decision earlier this year not to order a new national inquiry.

Well, of course he would. Ever willing to be led by populist sentiment, rather than to show real leadership, he obligingly gave them the U-turn they wanted. There would be an inquiry after all, he said, which he anticipated would be recommended in a report (now published) by Baroness Louise Casey.

A down-page item such as this is not the place to set out Heretic TOC’s view in any detail. What I will point to, though, is a blog from way back in 2013 which went quite deeply into the matter in ways which are still relevant and factually applicable today. See Street grooming: a nut to be cracked? See also the evidence I gave in 2018 to IICSA’s major inquiry , paragraphs 64-71, under the subheading “Localised grooming”.

For now, I will just emphasise that violently imposed or coerced sex are obviously criminal no matter what the age of the victim, whatever the race or religion of the perpetrator, and whether the context is individual or gang related, whether it is street crime or within the family, or whether churches, schools, sports clubs, etc. are involved or not. Whatever. It is right that all such cases are subject to prosecution.

What should not be tolerated (but there are strong suspicions it has been) are scenarios in which a particular race or religion is  given a free pass to offend by police, local councils, social workers and others, for fear that firm action would risk stirring up “community tensions”. All that turning a blind eye to such offences achieves is to stoke up justified resentment and potentially riotous unrest in those identifying with other communities, while leaving victims without justice.

I will just add that I see from a news item “hot off the press”, as I write, that one of Casey’s main recommendations looks particularly significant, and not in a good way. This concerns younger teenagers aged 13-15.

According to Casey, too many cases relating to this age range are being dropped or downgraded from rape to lesser charges. This has occurred, she says, where a 13 to 15-year-old had been perceived to be “in love with” or “had consented to” sex with the perpetrator. Even in these cases, she says, adults who intentionally have penetrative sex with a child under 16 should receive mandatory rape charges.

But why? Presumably, the evidence in such cases would be that they had not been raped. This is an excessively authoritarian move that does teenagers no service at all, being one of numerous ways in which they are being increasingly infantilised, denied all opportunity for autonomy and experiences they can truly call their own.

WILL THE MADNESS REGISTER WITH THEIR LORDSHIPS?

Meanwhile, in a quieter but potentially far more oppressive development for MAPs, the Crime and Policing Bill has been grinding  its way through the parliamentary process.

As Brian Ribbon pointed out in the Comments space here back in March, the Bill as drafted at that time included a new imposition on registered sex offenders (RSOs). They will be required to notify at least 12 hours in advance if they propose to enter premises at which children are present.

On the face of it, this could be an extremely onerous measure if it meant, for instance, having to give advance notice before going shopping at a supermarket, where children are often present, usually with their parents. Likewise, kids are to be found in almost  any public premises, from libraries to leisure centres, pubs, cafes, doctors’ and dentists’ surgeries, hospitals, hairdressers, and all sorts of shops. Is it seriously proposed that RSOs must give 12 hours’ notice before going into any of them?

Unfortunately, it is still hard to say. Nothing in the Bill, which has now passed through the House of Commons committee stage, appears to limit the requirement to certain types of premises, such as schools, or children’s homes. All that is said in the Bill as amended up to this point is that the “qualifying premises” in question will be those of a kind specified in regulations made by “the appropriate authority”, a term that refers basically to the government.

Brian told us he was seeking clarification as to what these regulations are going to be, but I am not aware of any elucidation so far. Maybe their lordships will inquire further, when the Bill reaches them after the report stage in the Commons this week. Or maybe not. In that eventuality, it will be interesting to see the police struggling with all the paperwork as they quickly become deluged with thousands upon thousands of notifications to assess on a daily – nay, hourly – basis.

Not that his victim thought so. A school classmate, she had spurned his faltering efforts at dating her (“I’m not that desperate”, she told him). Nor is he impressed with his own looks (“I’m ugly”). Humiliated, feeling he will never make it with girls, he confronts her in a carpark. CCTV footage captures him in what seems to be an angry verbal tirade before we see a knife in his hand. He stabs her again and again, killing her in an “incel” fury.

The searing emotional impact and crackling dramatic tension of this four-part Netflix series undoubtedly justifies the numerous rave reviews. But there were a few critics. Some complained that all the attention was on the perpetrator, none on the victim, emphasising his humanity and suffering at the expense of hers. Others protested that the narrative simplistically put all the blame on social media and misogynist influencers such as Andrew Tate.

A more compelling question for Heretic TOC, though, is why this series has been invested with such huge importance, treated by numerous commentators, including Keir Starmer, as though it were a fact-based drama, almost a documentary, like that other big hit, Mr Bates vs the Post Office. The answer, I suggest, bears a surprisingly strong connection to my opening remark about the boy’s attractiveness. Only a shameless nonce like me would talk openly about fancying him, but millions of viewers will also have been influenced, consciously or otherwise, by his angelic appearance.

I am reminded of  Alan Kurdi. The name may not mean anything to you now, but if you were following the news ten years ago you will probably recall a harrowing photo of a two-year-old Syrian toddler pictured dead on a Mediterranean beach. He had drowned along with his mother and brother. They had all been trying to reach Europe in a dangerous boat crossing as refugees from the civil war in their country in 2015. The tragic fate of little Alan, whose family had been among thousands of others fleeing a desperate situation, caught the imagination of the western public and media like nothing else.

The media at the time had been largely hostile to these refugees, who were seen as an invading horde, an impersonal mass of foreigners threatening to overwhelm our communities and either live off state benefits or steal our jobs. But just one single image of one dead child suddenly cut through all that. Alan was too real to ignore. Indisputably an innocent victim, he was also a highly relatable one. Looking well-dressed and cared for, he could have been the much-loved pride and joy of any western parent.

Bluntly, he also looked like a white boy – neither too black nor too poor to be seen as Other, which would have dulled our emotional response because, rightly or wrongly, we do tend to feel charity begins (and perhaps even ends) at home, with our own tribe, our kith and kin. It is  a sentiment JD Vance tried to justify recently by citing the Catholic theology of Ordo amoris (order of love), only to be put in his place by Cardinal Robert Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, who told him firmly he was wrong.

It will not have escaped the attention of those who saw Adolescence that the young killer, “Jamie”,  is white. That alone, for most British viewers, will have said he is “one of us”. As such, he is seen not as a monster but as just a vulnerable child with emotional problems crying out to be addressed with sympathy and understanding, an impression reinforced by his physical slightness.

Played with extraordinary conviction by Owen Cooper, who looks much younger than his 15 years, Jamie lacks for nothing in terms of loving parental support. The drama focuses mainly on his father, “Eddie Miller”, being put through the wringer of emotional trauma. Dad is the one tasked with going to the police station to be with Jamie as he is taken through the evidence against him. He sees the damning CCTV footage but is desperate to accept his son’s claim it has been faked. Eddie doesn’t tell Mum what he has seen, shielding his wife but leaving the full weight of the awful reality on his own shoulders, a reality that sees him agonised through a grim sequence of classic trauma reactions, starting with denial and progressing through anger, depression and grief over the blighted life that will inevitably be his son’s future as a convicted murderer.  Stephen Graham as Eddie, does surely award-winning justice to a demanding role.

A recurring theme in the Comments at Heretic TOC recently has been whether subjects are off-topic for this forum if they have only a remote connection to youth liberation or MAP concerns. Adolescence is obviously on-topic, but the question of Jamie’s whiteness and its implications quickly takes us much wider, onto less sure terrain. In my keenness to avoid the negative side of identity politics, in which white is set against black, males against females (BLs against GLs is also not unknown), I have tended to downplay “intersectionality”, which can all too easily degenerate into competitive victimhood, with those who claim  to have been sexually abused at the very top of the hierarchy, even when they lie about it – which they do because the rewards are so great, especially for showbiz people who need a “better” backstory.

Nevertheless, studying how the intersections of race, religion, gender, etc., affect politics and history remains an important analytic tool for interpreting our world. Our understanding of the potential for youth liberation or oppression is diminished if we ignore it.  I was reminded of this when I read (thanks to a link given in the Comments here) Brian Ribbon’s powerful cry of outrage in his article for Mu on the horrific situation in Gaza, especially the suffering of children there, including those far too young to be combatants.

Brian rightly directs much of his ire against American hypocrisy. It is a country that wages war on paedophiles in the name of protecting children, he says, but disregards children’s wellbeing “in the countries whose merciless destruction it actively funds and foments”, including Palestine. This, he believes, is “essentially the result of a racist and imperialist mindset, deeply entrenched in the belief that brown lives are worth less and are more expendable”.

I could not agree more with his attack on the policies of the extremist Israeli government, which in the opinion of humanitarian agencies and leading human rights lawyers have already involved numerous war crimes and could even be classed as genocidal. Even former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, in a BBC interview this week, called Netanyahu’s government a bunch of thugs. Those who blame everything on the admittedly horrific and also criminal 7 October 2023 raid led by Hamas, with its hostage-taking and atrocities against civilians, need to be aware that the situation did not start on that date. For those who feel the need for a quick briefing on the deeper background, I recommend A Very Short History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict by Ilan Pappé, who believes the Palestinian cause is just, despite being Jewish himself. He was a senior lecturer in history at the University of Haifa, Israel, for over 20 years. As such, he can hardly be dismissed as a biased Hamas militant, or an Islamist.

That said, to reduce a very complex situation simplistically to any single dimension, in this case to the racial one, of  “brownness” and “whiteness”, is to distort reality in favour of propaganda. As an analytical tool, intersectionality is meaningfully and usefully deployed when all the relevant intersections are considered, from culture to commerce and gender to geography, taking us through and beyond the more commonly theorised dimensions (gender, race, social class) of privilege and victimhood.

Brian’s article hints at this necessary complexity when he turns to America’s propensity for violence, including the mass murder even of white children. Nineteen young kids, most of them aged 10, and two teachers, were massacred almost exactly three years ago, in May 2022, at Robb Elementary School, Uvalde, Texas, gunned down by  a teenage former student at the school. The most politically significant aspect of this catastrophe is not the hateful behaviour of the lone killer himself. As with the Sandy Hook school massacre that I blogged about years ago, and many others, the key point is the national lack of will to make sure such violence never happens again. All that “kick ass America”, as I called it, ever does is shrug its shoulders and parrot platitudes such as “Guns don’t kill people, people do”. As Brian pointed out, guns are still said to be necessary to prevent tyranny, yet the very political forces claiming to defend this ideal have facilitated the birth of Trump’s tyrannical regime.

We might add that it is gun-toting “kick ass” cultures that give disaffected young men and teenage boys not only the firepower to go on the rampage but also, crucially, the attitude: resort to violence by individuals is legitimated and even glamorised in cultures where everyone plays hardball and Might Is Right.

Which brings me back home to Britain and to our fictional – but all too plausible – young murderer in Adolescence. Jamie used a knife not a gun, and his anger was directed  against just one victim, not many. But his mindset was arguably not so different to that of a mass killer. As an incel, his resentment was against all women for their imagined lack of any possible interest in him.

Not that  there was anything inevitable about this. Beliefs are formed and reinforced in social contexts, which vary with time and place. Just as violence comes more easily in a hardball culture, so does resentment against even supposedly liberal values when they go sour, degenerating,  as they regrettably have done on both sides of the Atlantic, from the progressive and noble task of enhancing the wellbeing and prospects of oppressed minorities – through “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) – towards new forms of tyranny in which the formerly oppressed classes themselves become the oppressors, the classic case being feminism.

I have always regarded myself, and remain to this day, an equal-opportunities feminist. Women around the world have earned great and well justified successes in their struggle against male dominance and patriarchal oppression. But their triumph has been so spectacularly successful it is now (in the US and UK at least) the males who are downtrodden. This extends, of course, to the oppression of MAPs, but it does not stop with us. It’s a ball-crusher for normies, too. The rules of consent have become so extensive, elaborate, and bureaucratised that many guys simply give up on romance and love, resorting instead to  the shallower but far less perilous satisfactions of porn.

This is the context that gives credibility to Jamie’s despairing conclusion that he will always be a loser in love: he is bound to be a loser not just because he thinks he is ugly but because the male winners in modern society are few and getting fewer, as today’s picky women keep swiping left. Ironically, feminists have long accused men of treating them as objects, not people, but now it is the guys who fall victim to casual “objectification” by women.

We see a version of this in the third episode of Adolescence, when Jamie is interviewed by a female forensic psychologist, “Briony Ariston”,  who is tasked with producing a pre-trial report on his mental capacity. Her professional standards require her to be objective, and in order to maintain that objectivity, she must not let her own personal feelings and opinions intrude on the interview, as this could influence and distort the interviewee’s response to questions. So, she must be as calm and poker-faced as possible. Officially, this objectivity is a million miles from “objectifying” anyone in a demeaning way. When you objectify someone, you are not really interested in them as a person. But from a professional standpoint, at least, Briony could hardly be more intensely interested in Jamie’s personality.

Jamie, however, takes a dim view of her detached attitude. It makes all her questions seem manipulative; and when, after telling her he believes he is ugly, it becomes inevitably offensive when she coldly refuses to contradict him. What really triggers him, though, sending him into a rage that derails and terminates the interview completely, is her response when he asks, “Do you like me? As a person, I mean. I don’t mean do you fancy me.” There is an awkward silence. Then a deadpan non-answer: “I am here in a professional capacity…”

Erin Doherty, as Briony, is fabulous in capturing the psychologist’s struggle to maintain her poise in the face of Jamie’s moodiness, swinging unpredictably as it does from childlike neediness to hot-tempered confrontation . After he is escorted away, we see her left alone in the empty interview room, forced to “take a moment”, the strain of her encounter etched on her face and audible in her breathing. She looks as though she could do with a stiff drink.

But that is not the face Jamie saw. To him she had been just another cold, indifferent, rejecting bitch.

KIDS INVITED TO PLAY NICELY

Four years ago, Everyone’s Invited, a charity that proclaims itself dedicated to “exposing and eradicating rape culture with empathy, compassion and understanding”, published a report on thousands of testimonies by mainly teenage girls disclosing sexual harassment they said they had suffered from school classmates. The alleged perpetrators had included boys at Britain’s poshest fee-paying schools. As might be expected, Heretic TOC duly commented, in “Everyone’s invited to reconsider childhood”.

A couple of months ago, the charity published a follow-up report, this time on primary schools, naming 1,664 schools in the UK where pupils had submitted anonymous testimonies of “rape culture”, detailing their experiences of “sexist name-calling, harassment, groping, inappropriate touching and penetration”. Innocent little kids, eh? Who’d have thought it! According to a report in The Times, “Their collective howl of pain is harrowing but this is the state of our children in 2025”.

If you want to know what I think, just read my earlier piece, linked above, because I do address the question of children’s introduction to sexual morals and manners from their early years onwards, and I believe what I said then still holds good now. My recommendation for a very early start to relationships education is echoed by the new report, and I find myself in agreement with at least some aspects of what Soma Sara, founder and CEO of Everyone’s Invited, has said, which includes a constructive comment on Adolescence. As her interviewer for a piece in The Times, put it:

The Netflix series Adolescence, which follows a young boy arrested for killing his female classmate, has been very helpful, she [Soma Sara] believes, in showing how every child is vulnerable, including those with loving parents. “This is a collective burden. There is one scene where the kid who has committed the atrocity is screaming to the therapist, ‘But do you like me’. I thought, that is it. Young men want to be seen and appreciated, not viewed as the problem the whole time. Girls had centuries of not being encouraged but now boys feel the same. We need to help them all.”

Where I part company from Sara and others who see “rape culture” everywhere is their tendency to see sexual expression itself as negative, especially among the young. The real problem, to the extent that there is one, is not sex per se but the lack of opportunity kids have for actually having sex from an early age. They need the chance to actually be doing it, before frustration starts making it harder to start with relaxed good manners – manners that can and should be taught from nursery school/kindergarten onwards.

BEEB BACKS BAD-BOY ARTIST ERIC GILL

A rare bit of good news from last month: the vandalised work of a famous MAP sculptor has been restored and gone back on display at one of London’s most prominent and prestigious locations, despite a campaign to have the piece removed and its creator “cancelled”.

There is little I need add. The Guardian’s report, the start of which is reproduced below, gives all the key details. So, enjoy!

The following is the start of the news report in The Guardian by media editor Michael Savage. The full article also includes a photo of the wider facade of Broadcasting House, giving a good idea of the statue’s prominent position:

A controversial sculpture outside the BBC’s London headquarters has been put back on display behind a protective screen after being restored, with the corporation saying it in no way condoned the “abusive behaviour” of its creator.

The work by Eric Gill, which depicts Prospero and Ariel from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, had been largely out of view since it was vandalised with a hammer in 2022. There have long been calls for Gill’s works to be removed since his diaries revealed he had sexually abused his two eldest daughters.

The BBC said it had taken advice before restoring the sculpture that adorns Broadcasting House, while visitors can now scan a QR code near the building to understand the dark background of the sculpture’s creator.

Gill’s statue was carved on-site for Broadcasting House in 1931 and 1932, underlining his status as one of the most prominent sculptors of the early 20th century. However, private diaries published several decades after his death in 1940 revealed his history of sexual abuse.

As well as the abuse of his daughters, they also documented sexual activity with the family dog. His statues, particularly his Broadcasting House work, have become a focus of attention for the hard right, including Tommy Robinson and the conspiracy group QAnon.

Broadcasting House is a Grade II* listed building, meaning it is of special interest. The cost of restoration and protective work was just over £500,000. “Broadcasting House is a building of historical and cultural significance and has been so for almost a century,” a BBC spokesperson said. “The sculpture of Ariel and Prospero – depicted as symbols of broadcasting – is an integral part of it.”

Not that this writer uses a pen, but the blogger who favours the longform essay does sometimes feel like a time-traveller from the quill pen age when all the “thinking” and change is being driven by the ultra shortform communicators of X and Truth Social, even though the only significant user of the latter is its owner, Donald Trump.

Trump, of course, since his return to office as US president on January 20, has been in the driving seat of this helter-skelter revolution, kicking ass everywhere from Greenland to Gaza while bizarrely licking one ass that truly needs a good kicking: Putin’s.

The “shock and awful” tactics have not been confined to Trump himself, though. His vice-president, J.D. Vance, is the latest to weigh in, with the infamous Munich speech in which he had the audacity and hypocrisy to take the EU to task for its alleged lack of freedom of speech and democracy – against a background in which his own president has bullied and threatened his critics in the media and attempted to overthrow democracy by force four years ago following his false claims of a stolen election, while more recently attempting to subvert international law by authorising economic sanctions against the international criminal court (ICC) – a court which could potentially see him indicted for complicity in war crimes by Israel.

What does all this mean for MAP radicals and for progressive politics?

Most obviously, and I hate to say I told you so (well, no, in all honesty I feel quite smug about it), we need to face the fact that Vance’s big speech must have been cheered to the rafters back home thanks to its core anti-woke message. In my last two blogs I gently pointed out (gently compared to Trump and his enforcers at least), that some aspects of woke ideology, not least the transgender activist’s insistence that “transwomen are women”, are demonstrably false and for that reason can only be imposed coercively (through “cancelling” etc.), with the inevitable result that most people are alienated.

Some skepticism was expressed here when I suggested that public discontent (not just among the MAGA masses but sensible moderates too) may have cost Kamala Harris the election. I gave some polling evidence in support of this claim, and recently we learned that Trump’s executive order excluding transwomen from female sport was probably the most popular thing he has ever done, gaining the approval of 67% of Democrat voters. Yes, that’s fully two thirds of Democrat voters, and a whopping 94% of Republican ones. We should of course support trans people against unfair discrimination in employment and other aspects of daily life, but the American electorate has overwhelmingly recognised that there are some fair and reasonable limits to the contexts in which transwomen can be considered women.

Fairness, alas, has been conspicuous by its absence from other aspects of the Trump revolution. It will help to focus on the manoeuvrings of Elon Musk, who now figures as the third great ass kicker of the new administration, ensconced in the White House as the boss of DOGE (best pronounced “dodgy”), which gives the richest man in the world the task of being as mean as possible, his brief allowing him to nix money going to everything from international aid to welfare payments for poor and vulnerable Americans. One might think this wide-ranging mission would keep him fully occupied, along with his multiple other jobs (including Tesla, xAI, SpaceX, social media X, and being dad to his eXotically named son X Æ A-Xii plus a soccer-team’s worth of siblings); but, no, back in the distant days of last month, before landing his dodgy DOGE gig, he somehow found time not just to pick a fight with the Labour government in the UK , but to conduct this campaign which such relentless ferocity that prime minister Keir Starmer and co were left reeling and soon bending to his will – with big implications  for policy towards MAPs and child protection.

Having such a big family, Musk might be thought to know a thing or two about the latter, but outward appearances can be deceptive. He has certainly gone out of his way to look the part lately, carrying his cute little kids on his shoulders to a string of high-profile political events and letting them play around the president’s Oval Office desk – possibly to the Donald’s irritation! But is he just cynically using his kids as props for a string of photo opportunities?

That has to be the suspicion when we factor in the manically workaholic drive that took him to the top. Work-life balance? Ha! Just like his factory production, his reproduction can only have been fucking fast and efficient, with not a second wasted on idle canoodling and sweet nothings! As for quality time with the kids, no chance! Musk’s family-man image is a lie, as exposed last year when his now adult transgender daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson gave her first interview, saying he that he had been an absent father who was cruel to her as a child for being queer and feminine.

But putting his little kids in front of the cameras to soften his image and falsely make him appear to be a great dad is the least of Musk’s media sins. Remember that amazing cave rescue in Thailand a few years back? When one of the British divers who played a heroic part in getting young boys to safety was trashed by Musk as a “pedo guy”? The diver lost a libel case after the tycoon’s outrageously baseless remark was presented in court as just a joke, although it had apparently been made in revenge because the diver had rejected Musk’s proposed rescue method. After that, Musk knew he could get away with saying anything about anyone, an understanding he has exploited most spectacularly against key political figures in Britain – his animus latterly driven by the fact that the UK has played a prominent role in attempting to regulate his social media platform.

It all kicked off last year with the horrific slaughter in Southport of three little girls at a Taylor Swift dance class – quickly rumoured on Musk’s by-this-time unmoderated X and elsewhere to have been committed by an illegal immigrant Islamist. Unsurprisingly, the country was soon ablaze with anti-Muslim riots, focused dramatically at times on accommodation for asylum seekers. It now appears the perpetrator, Axel Rudakubana, was actually a home-grown madman from Cardiff, with Christian parents originally from Rwanda.

But the facts were never going to matter to Musk, who notoriously gave a Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration and whose enthusiasm for Far Right extremism has been further signalled by his support for jailed street thug Tommy Robinson in the UK and the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in Germany, which alarmingly doubled its vote share in Sunday’s election to become the country’s second biggest party. Ignoring the facts, Musk disparaged the prime minister as “two-tier Keir” for allegedly protecting the interests of immigrants in Britain over those of native-born citizens. He even stirred things up by saying civil war in Britain was “inevitable”.

That was bad enough, but early last month saw a relentless mass strike from his intercontinental ballistic media missiles, even before Trump’s inauguration. It was the anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant theme again, this time focusing on what he called “the Pakistani-ancestry grooming gangs” scandal in a number of towns some years ago. On January 3, Musk posted: “Starmer was responsible for the RAPE OF BRITAIN when he was head of Crown Prosecution for 6 years. Starmer must go and he must face charges for his complicity in the worst mass crime in the history of Britain.”

Wow! I am no Starmer fan, but this is one helluva pork pie. It was actually Starmer, as Director of Public Prosecutions, who launched a big crackdown on the “grooming gangs”, which certainly included some genuinely nasty men who exercised coercive control over girls, a theme I explored in a blog at the time. My piece was called “Street grooming: a nut to be cracked?” and I concluded that action was needed but that the state was using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. It was a view I expanded on some years later when giving evidence to the IICSA. See paragraphs 64-71, under the subheading “Localised grooming”.

Musk’s totally baseless attack on Starmer wasn’t even the wildest or most vicious of his allegations. He also lashed out at Jess Phillips, the minister for “safeguarding and violence against women and girls” after she declined a request from Oldham Council for a government-led inquiry into “child sexual abuse” (CSA) in the town. He said she “deserves to be in prison” and called her a “rape genocide apologist”. She told the BBC that the lies spread by Musk (though she reportedly used the polite word “disinformation”) was putting her life in danger – which in my view was not an exaggeration when we remember that two MPs have been assassinated in recent years. Tempting as it is to rub our hands in glee at the likes of Starmer and Phillips getting a taste of their own frequent hate speech (towards MAPs), Musk’s irresponsible style is not the answer.

The immediate consequence of his outrageous “disinformation” was less dramatic than bloodshed but more ominous for the quality of our political life, and potentially for the future of democracy. There was panic at the heart of government. Their confidence already shaken after many months of bad press following a faltering start to their new administration six months earlier, the leading figures in Labour must have thought this sustained barrage of abuse from mighty Musk could truly cripple them, driving their traditional supporters in droves towards the populist Right.

So, when Musk said “Jump!”, it was inevitable they would soon answer, “How high?” He repeatedly called for a fresh national statutory inquiry into child sexual exploitation. The government resisted for a nanosecond but then announced a nationwide review of grooming gang evidence and five government-backed local inquiries. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has announced a new £10m fund, split into two parts, to tackle grooming gangs and CSA. A three-month national audit led by Baroness Louise Casey would examine gang demographics, their victims, and the “cultural drivers” of the crimes. Secondly, a judge, Tom Crowther KC, would assist in the development of several local reviews.

But there have already been many such reviews in quite recent times, including the IICSA one mentioned earlier, costing a vast amount of money to address largely imaginary problems and achieving nothing. As Boris Johnson put it, in one of his rare truthful utterances, it was all money “spaffed up the wall”. Instead of being knocked off course by a malignant psychopath like Musk, Labour would do better to focus on its more thought-out policies, such as the long-overdue attempt to reduce Britain’s massively excessive prison population, through more rehabilitative alternatives. Even this government’s often misplaced impulse to “protect” youth, who actually need more freedom and decent job prospects, will be better served by its new bill to “target people who groom children into criminal activity, including county lines drug dealing or organised robbery” than by raking through the tired old stuff Musk is so exercised over.

The bottom line is that in this country and America the real “protection” we all need is against the likes of Musk and Trump, not by them. Their idea is not democracy as Abraham Lincoln famously proposed it – government of the people, by the people, for the people – but government of the powerful, by the powerful, for the powerful. Note all those billionaires at Trump’s inauguration, the new oligarchs, or plutocrats: Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, now worth the thick end of $1 trillion between them and licking their lips at the fat government contracts and sweetheart deals that are bound to be coming their way, along with others for Trump himself: real estate in Gaza, rare earths in Ukraine. Welcome to the new age of robber barons, the new Gilded Age!

BREAKING NEWS: Like I said, things are moving very fast. Late news coming in after writing the last paragraph above: Trump shares “what’s next?” for Gaza AI video on Truth Social. Also: Ukraine official says minerals deal agreed with US.

DAMP SQUIB, OR STRAW IN THE WIND?

BBC Radio 4’s In Dark Corners, series two, focused on a membership list of the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE), which was brought to the attention of journalist and broadcaster Alex Renton after being held by the police for some years, but later passed into private hands.

Renton had hoped his investigation of names and addresses on the list would expose previously undetected “scandal”, but from his point of view the trail disappointingly led nowhere, as he admitted in his final episode.

By that time, there had already been a discussion about the series in the comments here, in which I had said it looked like being a “damp squib”. I was angered to hear Renton unfairly traducing some fine old friends from the 1970s and 80s, but with many of them now dead this was little more than a private concern for me personally.

The only really interesting revelation, for me, was about PIE members I had not known about, who had kept in the background and maybe joined with assumed names. The addresses alone would not have meant much to those of us who were running PIE. We just used them as a mailing list for our publications.

It was only through the media that we discovered ambassador Sir Peter Hayman had been a member, or the spy Geoffrey Prime. And now, from Renton, I found that Viscount Mersey, a hereditary peer, had been another Establishment figure in our ranks, and there was an unnamed former chaplain to the royal household.

Other members, we were told, included authors, academics, musicians, plus distinguished nature film-maker and TV presenter, Christopher Mylne, who worked with David Attenborough among others. Many of the rest had contributed solidly to society, with over 30 teachers, plus social workers, youth workers, military officers, psychologists and doctors – all of whom Renton had given himself the difficult task of presenting as evil, disgusting, horrible people!

Another point of interest is that Renton ended up giving a plug for Heretic TOC, which he described as a busy forum, ominously adding it was a space where, “In some ways PIE, and its ideas, live on”. So, a space he would clearly love to silence – as would Julie Bindel: see below.

But this is not the only MAP-friendly online space, is it? There are quite a lot of others these days, including Mu, where you can find an excellent episode-by-episode summary and critique of In Dark Corners.

IT’S CATCHING: JULIE PLUGS HTOC TOO

The lovely Julie Bindel has given a surprise plug on her substack for Heretic TOC. Thanks, sweetheart!

In an item quite rightly slagging off so-called national hero Peter Tatchell (about whom I blogged), she has graciously given me full credit for my assistance and even given a link to HTOC.

She says that in 2015 she was asked by The Times to interview me. I accepted her offer to chat over a very nice nosh in a posh Mayfair brasserie, during which Tatchell’s name came up. She now reports that in a follow-up email I gave her some useful lowdown about his early work, which included public support for child-adult sexual relations that he later denied, along with treacherous denunciation of MAPs, including me. She said her readers might wish to read a news report she co-wrote for the Telegraph newspaper, “which should give you a clear a picture of Tatchell’s child abuse apologism”. Then she puzzlingly added, “I thought it was worth pondering, however, (which is why I am posting a copy of his email [TOC: mine, not Tatchell’s] to me as well as his blog), why it is that Tatchell gets away with espousing these views?”

Why she thinks adding my email and blog details add anything that will help her readers to “ponder” Tatchell’s dodging of cancellation is a mystery. Maybe she just wants to promote my work because she is a secret admirer? However, that theory takes a bit of a tumble when she refers to my “hideous blog”, adding, “The man is utterly grotesque, and I wish him the worst.”

Let’s say her fandom is a work in progress!

COULD HAVE SAVED MYSELF THE BOTHER

After putting out my marathon slog through the major concepts relating to sex and gender last time, I chanced upon a marvellous article that could have saved me much of the trouble. Titled “Do Sex and Gender Have Separate Identities?”, is an academic piece by Gonzalo R. Quintana and James G. Pfaus that says more or less what I did but in considerably greater detail and with much greater authority.

So, I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to explore the issues further. To facilitate this, I here give my own link to the full paper. The best bit is a brilliant diagram. See Figure 2.

Part 1 of this two-part blog looked at how woke identity politics, especially on trans issues, may have cost Kamala Harris the US presidential election. Protestations to the contrary have since appeared in the comments, notably along the lines “It was the economy, stupid” (albeit phrased far more politely!). However, even if these claims were true (which is debatable), my main point – that trans extremists have been their own worst enemies – appears to have won broad acceptance here, based on a range of evidence. From this starting point, Part 2 will examine the conceptual muddle that enabled so many activist “transgressions” to go unchecked before the bubble burst. To the limited but significant extent that our influence from a MAP perspective allows, the intention is to strengthen the trans cause, not to trash it. The aim today will be to bring some clarity to a tangle of convoluted issues, with a special focus on the language and concepts involved. The extent to which any newfound clarity will help us sharpen our focus on future possibilities, such as the potential for a youth-MAP-trans alliance, will hopefully emerge in subsequent debate.

Please be aware that in order to untangle these exceptionally confusing issues clearly, I have found it necessary to spell out my thinking rather fully, so this blog has ended up much longer than usual and it requires careful reading. Accordingly, it will be best if you make yourself comfortable and take your time. No need to rush through it all in one go.  

GENDER IS NON-BINARY

Part 1 included a provocative assertion that the queer strategy of challenging entrenched normative language might have a major downside. The disruption of dubious binary concepts including gender, which is about much more than just male and female, has its uses, I wrote, “but it is also capable of marooning us in a meaningless verbal morass, leaving us vulnerable to stupid policy making that harms kids.”

Let’s explore how this happens, starting with the relatively coherent, intellectually sustainable idea that gender is a spectrum, with male and female at its extremities and many different possibilities of gender identity and expression in between. Even though 99% of the world’s population identify as male or female, rather than non-binary, the spectrum (or perhaps bi-modal distribution) concept is valid – and becoming increasingly important given that those identifying as non-binary (including transgender, gender-fluid, etc.) shoots up from 1% to 4% among Gen Z respondents to the LGBT+ Pride Global Survey of gender ID and sexual orientation.

So far, so good. Gender, as understood in this context, is a concept that refers to the immensely rich variety of ways in which we humans behave and think about ourselves. Following the usefully disruptive work of earlier generations of queer theorists, it has become possible to think outside the two big gender boxes. That is how, after a lifetime of self-declared confusion, the writer Quentin Crisp found himself finally liberated from being pigeon-holed in his own mind as a “homosexual” male when he discovered in his eighties that he was non-binary, and transgender. Gender, in other words, is a social concept of flexible application, not a fixed category or “natural kind”.

SEX IS BINARY

The trouble starts when queer theory is misapplied to undermine non-social concepts that do constitute natural kinds, of which the prime example we need to examine is the binary, fixed, naturally unalterable distinction between male and female. Messing about with these terms can get us into deep water, as happened a few years ago to influential feminist biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling. She got a bit carried away when she distinguished no fewer than five different sexes (male, female, merm, ferm, and herm). After being put on the spot by numerous scholars, she later recanted, saying her earlier work had been a provocation, offered “tongue in cheek”.

If we delve into the relevant biology, we can easily see why Fausto-Sterling had failed to curb her enthusiasm for nature’s queerness, because there is no shortage of it. As I noted in a blog on “the intersex brain” some years ago:

There are even mosaic situations in which the same individual possesses both XX (female) and XY (male) cell types. Bizarrely, as reproduction expert Milton Diamond puts it “a person might have an arm considered male because its cells are all XY while the same person’s leg might be considered female because its cells are all XX”.

More familiar, albeit rare, are so-called “intersex” conditions that result in genital ambiguity at birth. These cases can make it difficult to tell at first glance whether a baby is male or female, but that does not mean they are somewhere in between. They are always either one sex or the other.

In all anisogametic sexually reproducing species reproduction occurs by combining a large gamete (the ovum, or female egg) with a small gamete (male sperm). In mammals, each individual produces only one kind of gamete. Whether a mammal embryo develops into a male or a female is determined by a pair of sex chromosomes: XX for females, XY for males. Sex in all animals is defined by gamete size; sex in all mammals is determined by sex chromosomes; and there are two and only two sexes: male and female. This applies even when there are “intersex” chromosomal variations, such as Klinefelter syndrome, where a male has an extra X chromosome (XXY).

Now, it might seem arcane and unnecessary to dwell on microscopic stuff when our real concern is what decisions kids can make about their bodies as they are growing up, by which time all sorts of truly queer, non-binary differences in individual development will have affected us, possibly including unusual hormonal goings on in the womb before we were born, which may make us more masculine or less so. Everything we experience in childhood, from the influence of our parents and peers to what we eat, plays a part in our individuality, including our experiences and understandings of gender and sex. These things make us all rather quirky. As the old saying goes, “There’s nowt so queer as folk”.

But please understand that the point of dwelling on gametes is that the language of male and female is the issue right now; not, for the moment, our personal development and choices. The language we use is fundamental to our ability to think clearly, and without clarity we will run into disaster, as we shall see below.

ONE BECOMES A WOMAN

Note that the terms male and female apply to all the sexually reproducing species, be they reptiles, birds, fish, whatever, from the tiny wasp Dicopomorpha echmepterygis to the gigantic blue whale. They represent natural kinds, which hold good throughout nature. In order to think clearly about sex, we need to hold onto these terms and their clear meaning. The terms man and woman, however, apply only to our own species. To the extent that we see them as matched in lock step with male and female, as per the traditional dictionary definitions (man: adult human male; woman: adult human female) we might think these also represent natural kinds.

But this is not the case. The terms man and woman reflect the highly individual lives we have experienced when growing up, including our genderings. As Simone de Beauvoir famously said, “One is not born, but becomes a woman”. What is meant by womanhood, what is expected of a woman, what she thinks it would be feminine to wear, whether she thinks it appropriate to be ambitious in a career, or better to devote herself to home and family, are aspects of this womanly “becoming”. Nevertheless, although the word woman has a strong social element and is not a natural kind, it also has a fundamental natural component. All women are born female.

J.K. Rowling has decided we need to be reminded of this. On Mother’s Day last year, she tweeted: “Happy Birthing Parent Day to all whose large gametes were fertilised resulting in small humans whose sex was assigned by doctors making mostly lucky guesses.”

Unambiguously, this is a mocking attack on inclusive transgender language, as is her most famous earlier tweet: “‘People who menstruate’,” she wrote in 2020. “I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?”

Witty, but cruel and transphobic, some would say. On the contrary, in this case we really do need to be cruel – or at least blunt – to be kind, and it is not transphobic to do so given that we all benefit (including transgender people) from sticking to clear language. Without it there can be no clear policy grounded in clear evidence and its clear interpretation. Am I making myself clear?

SEX ASSIGNED AT BIRTH

Still with me? Still clear? Then it is time to start identifying the harm to which the misguided use of inclusive language can lead, beginning with “sex assigned at birth”. As philosopher Alex Byrne and biologist Carole K. Hooven have pointed out, women (biological ones, not trans ones) are nearly twice as likely as men to experience harmful side effects from drugs, a problem that may be ameliorated by reducing drug doses for females. Males, on the other hand, are more likely to die from Covid-19 and cancer, and they too may need sex-specific treatment. For this reason, public health policy messages are best directed clearly at men and women (or boys and girls), without using language likely to confuse ordinary people outside the woke elites who obsess over these things.

You think they don’t get confused? Think again. Consider what another philosopher, Elizabeth Barnes, has said on the matter, not because of her day job but because she has Parkinson’s, although men are much more likely to get it than women, and they need different advice because, for them, the condition has differences in prevalence, symptoms, and disease trajectory. She writes:

The use of language like “assigned male at birth” is, in this context, at best misleading. If you’re male, you’re not more likely to get Parkinson’s because of a decision a doctor made after looking at your genitalia. You’re more likely to get Parkinson’s because of differences between male and female biology – differences we don’t yet fully understand, and which crucially need more (not less) attention.

She readily admits that as a philosophy professor she has no difficulty with gender inclusive terms, or their abbreviations, such as “AMAB” and “AFAB”. However, she realised that it was a very different matter when she was consulted by a less well-educated family member seeking her advice after he contracted Parkinson’s. She continued:

My family member… is among the group most likely to get Parkinson’s – an older white man without a college education from the rural south or Midwest (an area of prevalence sometimes called “the Parkinson’s belt”) who has a background working in and around agriculture. This group is also, of course, a group that has seen a sharp increase in distrust of institutions, especially healthcare institutions. And it’s a group especially likely to be unfamiliar with – and very skeptical about – something like describing Parkinson’s disease as more common “in people assigned male at birth (AMAB)”.

This old white guy, in other words, is exactly in the demographic who have been getting mightily pissed off with wokery and voting for Trump as a result. Such people are not the enemy. They are not “the Right”. Like trans kids, they are simply folks with health care needs that need to be addressed with careful clarity.

TRAPPED IN THE WRONG BODY

Speaking of which, let’s get back to those kids and their needs. They too are better served by clear language than by gobbledygook. We know that trans kids have a deep feeling that their minds and souls are of the opposite sex to that of their bodies. But that would mean nothing unless there really were two sexes, one the opposite of the other. It is far more honest to tell them so, and far more conducive to them working out their best health choices, if they are given clear, accurate information rather than indulged in fantasies such as the feminine essence narrative.

There can be no “essence” of femininity. It is literally impossible. Why? Because gender norms greatly vary from one culture to another, from dress codes to career choices. Because gender is a social construction, there is nothing in it that cannot potentially be changed. Therefore, no element of gender expression is indispensable, or – same thing – essential.

This is not to deny that “trapped in the wrong body” feelings can be very real and important. But it makes sense to look for an explanation in reproductive and developmental biology i.e. in factors such as in utero masculinisation or feminisation of the foetus (including the foetal brain), comparable with those that have been implicated in the development of homosexuality and paedophilia. Indeed, neurological research of transwomen has detected (albeit controversially) a degree of brain feminisation. This has nothing to do with gender as that word is understood these days i.e. the social construction interpretation of the term.

GENDER, A CLOSER LOOK

It may be helpful to distinguish four ways in which the word gender is now used: 1. As a synonym: another word for sex; 2. In grammar; 3. As an element of identity; 4. As a performance.

Before the rise of second wave feminism in the later part of the 20^th century, which Simone de Beauvoir pioneered with her 1949 book The Second Sex, the words sex and gender were often used synonymously. One major use not directly tied to human biology, though, is the fascinating role it plays in grammar, where in many non-English languages it is assigned to inanimate things, with apparently arbitrary and uber-queer results. In French, for instance, not only are “table”, “chair” etc., designated as feminine, but there are also slang words for the genitals that are the reverse of what might be expected. So, for cunt we have the masculine definite article “le con” and “le barbue”, and for cock we have the feminine article “la queue” and “la pine”. Male nouns for female sex organs, and vice versa! Would you Adam and Eve it!

This grammatical aspect makes an entertaining diversion, but of course the main focus of current public concern is gender identity, which is expressed through performance – Judith Butler’s fancy term for enacting gender roles through our dress and behaviour. Mercifully, having already attended to “trapped in the wrong body” as a conceptual issue, we will not need to dwell any further on either identity or performance in the abstract. We already have a good enough working understanding of the terms.

WHAT IS A WOMAN?

There is one further linguistic abstraction I should touch upon, though, at least briefly: polysemy, the ability of words to have several valid meanings. I had a long email debate last year with a philosopher friend who holds the view (which is orthodox in itself but susceptible to being taken too far) that words mean whatever a significant number of their users intend them to mean, or even a single user, such as a famous podcaster, if their newly coined meaning of a word goes viral. Dictionaries reflect this. The definitions they give do not come from an academic ivory tower. They are based on actual usage by speakers and writers of the language in question.

My friend professed himself comfortable with trans activists’ insistence that “A trans woman is a woman”. He felt that, because they were using the word “woman” in a new(ish) sense that had clearly gained quite widespread currency, it should be accepted. The main standard definition of woman (“adult human female”) should remain in the dictionaries, he averred, because that is the sense in which most people still use it, but a further definition could be added to accommodate those who identify as women and choose to live in accordance with accepted female gender roles and performance criteria (dress codes, etc.).

There is certainly a case to be made for this; and, as I have indicated before, I have no problem with using a transwoman’s preferred pronouns and, as a courtesy, behaving in her company as though she is indeed a woman. But this cannot be any more than a courtesy. Why not? Because, as we have seen above, there are medical issues (among other comparable social concerns: see Gribble et al.) that make it necessary for the primary definition of woman to trump the courtesy one. As the philosopher (sorry, yet another one!) Alex Byrne has argued, the fact that a word may have many legitimate different meanings does not mean that language cannot be harmfully misused, and his opinion is that misuse (through, in effect, denying the primacy of the primary meaning) has been a feature of the great “What is a woman?” debate.

A TAXONOMY OF GENDER DYSPHORIA

Having thus addressed the conceptual framework and unpacked its confusions and conundrums, it is time to take a final and more detailed look at the wisdom or otherwise of pursuing a policy of “gender affirming care” for all children who self-identify as transgender.

Like adult transgender people, gender dysphoric children are individuals, who need to be treated as such. It will help, though, to consider a basic taxonomy of four different transgender types, to which distinct treatment pathways are applicable. As identified in an HTOC blog some years ago, these are:

1. child-onset gender dysphoria (GD) associated with marked gender nonconformity (both natal sexes)
2. adolescent-to-adult onset GD associated with autogynephilia (AGP) (natal males only)
3. late-onset female-to-male GD associated with unusual sexual and gender fantasies (natal females who want to have sex with/as gay men…); broadly, gay transmen.
4. adolescent-onset GD in natal females that has a strong social/iatrogenic component, specified as Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD).

The opinions on treatment I will now briefly set out are merely personal rather than expert, but they are based on a much closer acquaintance with the evidence than will be found in most public discourse. In general, social transition for children is fine. I have no problem with it. But many kids regret being fast-tracked towards risky hormonal treatments and, far worse, disastrously mutilating and irreversible surgical procedures. Fast-tracking can and should be avoided. Every case needs extremely careful consideration.

GENDER AFFIRMING CARE

The watchword among cautious practitioners has been that medical interventions should only be considered when kids have shown they are sure they know their own minds by being “Consistent, Insistent, and Persistent” (CIP) in their GD and their pursuit of transition. This strikes me as a good criterion for category 1, those who since early childhood have manifestly been girlish boys or boyish girls. But it is not the last word. Many of these youngsters are quite simply gay; they might well be happier growing up to be gay adults living in their natal sex than changing. Only in homophobic societies is there any need to change. Accordingly, a better outcome than changing the kids to fit society, is to work for social change that accommodates us all.

The CIP approach works less well for the later-onset dysphoria seen in categories 2-4. When adolescents present with these types of GD there is less time in which “watchful waiting” (another professional rule of thumb) can be usefully applied. Puberty itself does not wait, so puberty-blocking hormones must be applied in timely fashion to be effective. It could well be the case, though, that it is in these categories that many young people might be best served by physical change, because it would appear impossible to meet their sexual, romantic, and other life-style needs in any other way. See transwoman Natalie Wynn’s marvellous ContraPoints podcast and you will understand why. Wynn denies that she is AGP, and she has a witty, slickly presented blast against the psychologists who have championed AGP as a category, in part because she sees them as wrongly pathologising trans people. I think she has a point; but she also honestly ends up by admitting to some common ground with the experts in question.

As for category 4, ROGD, the theory it puts forward is based on the observation that in recent years there has been a sudden, very large increase in adolescent girls identifying as trans, and that in this group the impulse to transition has been driven by social factors such as peer group dynamics, social media use, and prior mental health issues. Lisa Littman, whose research published in 2018 gave ROGD its name, speculated that rapid onset of gender dysphoria could be a social coping mechanism for other disorders, such as depression and anxiety. Her hypothesis sparked outrage and accusations of transphobia. But it is a hypothesis with strong explanatory value in relation to a striking social development that otherwise lacks any convincing explanation; and now, following further research the deniers are in retreat. If you read nothing else from all the links in this blog read what Amy Tishelman, former research director of Boston Children’s transgender clinic, said in a recent interview. She has become a critic of the field she helped to create and is now clearly paying serious attention to ROGD. The implication is that the mental health history and social influences on every child need to be explored thoroughly, without rushing headlong towards the conclusion that “gender affirming care” is the right option.

THE TERFS AND J.K. ROWLING

I should point out that in none of the extensive analysis above have I even touched upon any of the objections to transgender rights that have been put forward by the TERFs. The case for caution in relation to adolescent physical transition has nothing to do with their claims, which often do seem to be grounded in transphobia – definitely so in the case of the hateful harridans of Reduxx, who are also (more than coincidentally) virulently anti-MAP, and whose co-founder Anna Slatz has flirted with the neo-Nazi Far Right.

Which brings me back to J.K. Rowling, who has been strongly identified with the TERF camp thanks to her belief that transwomen who have a penis should be excluded from women’s spaces (such as rape crisis centres, women’s prisons, female designated public conveniences, and competitive women’s sport) but who insists that she is not against trans people. I think the TERF case is strong on all the above issues; but I suspect that unlike the truly transphobic hard-liners, Rowling would be among those who would be interested in potential compromise solutions that would keep all reasonable parties happy:  such as working towards more unisex public conveniences.

I come back to Rowling because something needs to be said to fellow heretics here who expressed their “disappointment” at Part 1 of this blog, and who may now be even more upset to see me double down in Part 2. I urge them to consider carefully the arguments and evidence I have presented, rather than reacting in knee-jerk fashion.

Rarely is it easy to take a stance against strong opinion within one’s own “tribe” and friendship circle. But sometimes it is necessary to tell hard truths and “do the right thing”. In her first book Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Rowling emphasised this very point. Soon after that book appeared in 1997 and became a global sensation, followed by the associated film in 2001, I wondered why the kids were being blown away by it, and decided to read the book myself, to find out.

I was impressed, and one incident in the story stood out for me. Do you remember a character called Neville Longbottom? He is presented as someone of no great distinction, just a modest boy with not much confidence, the sort who manages to “get by with a little help from his friends”. So, he really needed these friends. But there comes a time when he must risk losing their friendship by telling them they are in the wrong. This is his big moment. He finds his courage, sticks to his guns, and wins the day.

Rowling has said in an interview that “there’s a lot of Neville in me – this feeling of just never being quite good enough… I felt that a lot when I was younger”. For that reason, she wanted Neville to do something brave, in which Neville “finds true moral courage in standing up to his closest friends – the people who are on his side” towards the climax of the novel.

There is much less at stake for me than for Neville, or even than there was for Rowling when she was a young unknown. By contrast, I have no lack of self-confidence these days (different when I was younger), and I am not that bothered over making myself unpopular. After all, I’ve had a lifetime of experience at it!