One of the qualities that overwhelmingly characterizes the attitude adopted by sexologists advocating either conversion therapy for trans children or for normalization and destigmatization of adult sexual interest in children (or both) is a pervasive, deeply troubling callous indifference toward the young person’s experience of acute distress. We’ve be given permission to share this article […]
Month: April 2023
Incredulity, Incuriosity, and The Academy
I remember when I was in college taking an intro to philosophy course, the professor told us that Aristotle said that swallows hibernate at the bottom of lakes in the mud and it was just taken as canonical knowledge for like 2000 years. I laughed thinking it was silly as hell, and while I forget […]
Three Short Arguments About Youth Liberation and Body Autonomy
⚠Content Warning: Discussion of Sexual Violence, Sexual Coercion, Child Sexual Assault, Rape Apologia, Pedophilia (Non-Graphic) Introduction This will not be a very well-organized essay, since it amounts to more or less collating and editing a few related conversations and arguments I had several years ago concerning the matter of body autonomy and youth liberation. At […]
Book Review: “Harmful to Minors,” by Judith Levine
⚠Content Warning: Sexual Violence, Sexual Coercion, Child Sexual Assault, Rape Apologia, Pedophilia Table of Contents: The Short Version and the Long Version This was supposed to be a one-paragraph blurb. Numerous times since I began talking about youth liberation, consent, and rape culture, friends and radicals have asked what I think of Judith Levine’s highly […]
Every Rapist is a Cop Without a Badge
⚠Content Warning: Sexual Violence, Sexual Coercion, Child Sexual Assault, Rape Apologia, Pedophilia (Non-Graphic) This is a follow-up to a previous article. To read Part I, please click here. A feature of the rape apologist ideology to which feminist analysis of rape-as-power responds is the reversal of the power relations between the victim and the rapist. […]
Sex, Desire, and Violence
⚠Content Warning: Sexual Violence, Sexual Coercion, Child Sexual Assault, Rape Apologia, Pedophilia (Non-Graphic) This essay is one of a two-part series. Read Part II here. Table of Contents: On Strange Bedfellows You have most likely heard someone assert that, “rape is not sex, rape is power.” Or the somewhat less reductive: “rape is not about […]