Toward a coherent theory of fascism and child abuse
Bullfrog
Shipmate
Here's an uncomfortably thought-out article laying out - in detail - the relationship between child sexual abuse and current conservative ideology.
[ UK libel law is much stricter than US -linking to a libel likely falls under repeating the libel. See host post - L Epiphanies host ]
And it just seemed...well...weird to me that this was such a fixation. I've known victims. I've been through trainings on the topic in seminary and at my job (Catholic employer.) I've heard of Michael Jackson and I have enough psychology and comfort-with-discomfort to kind of put together a sense of how a guy can end up like that.
But I've never before seen it put together as a thesis tying political ideology so directly. This is extreme rape culture, and I think it makes sense.
I am sure this thread deserve all the trigger warnings, hence Epiphanies, but anyone else seeing this?
[ UK libel law is much stricter than US -linking to a libel likely falls under repeating the libel. See host post - L Epiphanies host ]
I've been hearing, since high school, an obsession among political conservatives with childhood sexual abuse. And I've heard for years of the scandals erupting in churches, and this is hardly unique to the Roman Catholics (as the article acknowledges, to my appreciation.)The time for polite pretense is long over. Pedocon theory is not about a unique kind of mental illness that just happens to be concentrated in the Republican Party. It is not about "uncontrollable animal urges." It is about how racial anxieties and obsessions, fantasies of patriarchal domination and control, lead inexorably towards the idea that women and children exist for men's use—including sexual use. Pedophilia is simply this libidinal obsession with power and domination put into practice.
And it just seemed...well...weird to me that this was such a fixation. I've known victims. I've been through trainings on the topic in seminary and at my job (Catholic employer.) I've heard of Michael Jackson and I have enough psychology and comfort-with-discomfort to kind of put together a sense of how a guy can end up like that.
But I've never before seen it put together as a thesis tying political ideology so directly. This is extreme rape culture, and I think it makes sense.
I am sure this thread deserve all the trigger warnings, hence Epiphanies, but anyone else seeing this?
Comments
When I was young it was not unusual for famous and wealthy men in their 30s to have young teenage girlfriends. To mention a few people who are now dead; Jerry Lee Lewis married his cousin Myra Lewis Williams who was I think 12 or 13 at the time. David Bowie was said to have had relationships with teenage groupies.
It feels like when powerful men are essentially untouchable, they tend to behave in utterly disgusting ways.
I guess Nazis are, or believe themselves to be, unaccountable and unaffected by laws and norms that constrain everyone else.
I think there is probably an ethical distinction between conscious and unconscious power - between the "grab 'em by the pussy" tendency of rich and powerful old men and "woah these teenage girls are really into me; let's not look too closely at their ages" of young pop stars. Both are obviously abusive but the latter seems not to have the same level of mens rea. The difference between coercion and exploitation, perhaps?
Actually, no, on reflection and reading a bit more I think that's bollocks and I've absorbed some of the myth-making around groupies. There were plenty of managers around the pop stars pushing the girls towards them and dangling access in exchange for sex just as much as Weinstein. Ugh.
The article that was linked from Liberal Currents contains potentially libellous comment on a very rich powerful and litigious person and shouldn't be linked.
The kind of general issues raised by the article can be discussed but please dont link to it or quote anything from it that could be defamatory of a given person.
Thanks
Louise
Epiphanies host
Noted, thanks for the correction.
The person mentioned in the article is rich and known to sue over defamation.
Therefore please dont do anything to disseminate the article more widely here like giving its title.
I've asked the admins in case they have a different understanding of the law as they are the people put directly at risk if libel is posted here. If they answer differently then I'll amend as they direct.
[Update - admins confirm - that's a no to sharing title]
Thanks
Louise
Epiphanies host
I think you have to consider that the #MeToo movement terrified a lot of people who were either comfortable with or looking forward to their moment of impunity.
Both my children were given copies of a "Youth Bible" by our church. Neither is in our house just now, so I can't quote directly. These Bibles had little contemporary stories included to illustrate various passages, and one was about a teenage girl who lost her virginity to a pop star. The message was IIRC that she was the sinner in this scenario. I wasn't all all happy with this particular story! That was only 16 years ago, so the myth-making around "groupies" was going strong in some church circles then.
From an article in The Atlantic about child marriage in the US (2023):
I have known folks personally who were unable to talk about their own sexual abuse in conservative churches because of the culture of shame/blame.
So the obsession with child abuse isnt about children having liberty or free consent (the very same people absolutely dont want young people to have rights like access to contraception or sex education) but about their 'pure' property being 'sullied' or damaged but it's perfectly OK if it's happening to those they deem inferior or impure or 'not them' who are the 'property' of powerful white men. That's the system working as intended.
You see patriarchal thinking in supposedly liberal/ left politics where you get attacks on autonomy like anti trans or anti- autistic moral panics by parents who feel their control over their children is threatened and in various moral panics about 'youth'.
It's more likely to be found overtly on the modern fascist right but patriarchal attacks on the agency and autonomy of others can be found to at least some extent most places.
Bullshit. No cultural tradition justifies marrying a child.
Defining who is and isn't a child is at least somewhat culturally conditioned. Scots law has for a long time considered 16 to be the age of adulthood. We now have a somewhat mixed system where rights tend to extend down to 16 but protections extend up to 18. I don't know that I can say that two 16 year olds getting married (as I believe still happens in some traveller communities) is definitively wrong in a way that two 18 year olds marrying wouldn't be.
Nope, this is not the problem. The problem is that liberal groups with a fair amount of sway in Sacramento -- the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and the Children's Law Center -- oppose legislation to make 18 the minimum age to get married in California. Their argument is that doing so would put us on a slippery slope to make 18 the legal age for access to abortion. The ACLU says it's a problem to put restrictions on marriage.
18 is actually the legal age for marriage here, but there's a giant loophole -- underage people can get married with written consent of one parent and a court order. So parents forcing their daughter to get married need to get a judge to sign off on it, and clearly that's not hard to do. Sometimes girls are forced to marry men for immigration purposes; sometimes it's because the parents belong to a religious group that encourages child brides. According to the data, sometimes it's boys -- 14% -- but I can't find stories that say what's happening in these cases.
I'm not going to judge Arab merchants of the sixth and seventh centuries AD; on the other hand I'd say such things are absolutely wrong in modern industrial societies.
Sorry, I was referring to the Atlantic article quoted by @pease using a 12yo as an example - I think we would all agree that a 12yo is definitely a child. And in California (to use that example) it is perfectly legal for a 30yo to marry that 12yo - we're not talking about only Romeo & Juliet situations.
One of the main problems is children being able to get married but not get divorced until they reach. This makes it much more likely that a married child will endure domestic abuse because they legally cannot escape.
In reality, we (general "we") put all kinds of restrictions on marriage already - I presume that the ACLU has no issue with laws against incestuous marriage. An underage person can't get divorced even with parental consent, so if a 12yo gets married they are legally stuck in that marriage for 6 years.
Abortion is fundamentally a medical issue, and marriage is not. I do not think that (understandable) concerns about restrictions on abortion justifies child marriage.
I think there are also more subtle instances in liberal/left circles, such as widespread demonisations of age gaps in relationships from Gen Z and the "Puriteen" phenomenon. Such behaviour often comes from people who wouldn't dream of participating in transphobia for eg, but is frequently just misogyny dressed up in "woke" language.
Re “Liberals and the left aren't the same thing,” that depends on the meaning in whatever country/society is involved. Here in the US, “liberal” generally, in common usage, means “left” as opposed to “conservative,” which means “right.”
Liberal and left have specific meanings, whether they are colloquially used in different ways or not. It's not like the DSA are referring to themselves as liberals, and they're very much Americans.
But people are actively campaigning to keep the lack of minimum age for marriage. That's different to simply having a lower age of consent. Also, it's a problem precisely because 14yo brides aren't unheard of even now - because it's still perfectly legal for a parent to marry their 14yo daughter to a man twice her age now in 2026 California (but of course, two 30yo women marrying each other is abhorrent....). Child marriage is an active ongoing phenomenon in the US.
What happened to your grandmother wasn't just some quirky old-time custom, it was child abuse. People in your grandmother's day absolutely knew that. Raising the age of consent was a Victorian phenomenon - even they knew that a 14yo was physiologically a child.
There are lots of circles in the USA where members of the left will take grievous offense at being called liberals. There is a left and a right wing, but "liberal" usually implies a nearer-to-center attitude, while "left" implies further from the center.
These are of course subjective terms, but I've been many places where "liberal" and "left" are distinct groups who generally don't get along.
Another nuance is "liberal" tends to favor "individual liberty" while "left" tends to be more ideologically programmatic.
He did qualify it saying it should not apply to children as he thought that choosing a life required a level of adult maturity to comprehend the full implications of a choice.
In modern life I think we generally think that a person should not be simultaneously considered a child and an adult, that if they (for example) cannot divorce they then should not be able to marry. If they are not in a position to be economically literate and independent then it is difficult to show that they are making a free choice to marry considering all the implications of that contract.
I think we also appreciate the emotional and physiological impacts of puberty much more than we did even 100 years ago.
If there is a case to be made for associating it with particular political ideologies, it isn't one that the article in question succeeds in making.
Without refering to the article, can you explain that? Why would social conservatism mean young people getting married?
It was a response to the previous post about the patriarchy and support for it, which would generally be associated with social conservatism.
But I can see that social conservatives may be in favour of marrying people off before they get "tainted by the world" (which may well map to anxieties about virginity - especially female virginity). You can see this dynamic at work in things like the Silver Ring Thing and the courtship movement.
I thought the point was about older men and younger teenage girls.
But either way, I'm still not seeing why either are socially conservative concerns. I do not see the connection between celibacy pledges and youth marriage.
I think most Western countries have a range of ages at which one transitions from "child" to "adult".
- When are you allowed to vote?
- When are you deemed legally competent to sign most contacts?
- When can you drive a car?
- When can you join the military?
- When can you drink alcohol?
- When can you purchase other legal intoxicants?
- When does compulsory schooling end?
- When can you work in various different occupations / with different equipment?
- When does your parents' income stop being relevant to whether you can get student loans and grants?
- When can you no longer be included on your parent's health insurance?
So I think we all simultaneously consider people both children and adults depending on context. I'd agree with you, of course, that marriage and divorce, as effective inverses, should not have a different age limit.
For another thing, I've read that "adolescence" as a social category didn't exist until my parents' childhood. It would've seemed a luxury to a previous generation when for - poor folks - survival meant getting to work or breed as quickly as possible. Even today I think there's a class thing there. For educated folks, @Gwai and I had children relatively early for peers. I know a lot of people who are now raising toddlers as my oldest is embarking on college. It's a strange feeling.
And I think fascism is also heavily geared toward making "the nation" powerful for "the military," and that means producing a lot of surplus expendable "beta" mean who can be churned out as cannon fodder. So you need women for that, for biological reasons. You need to be making more babies for the fatherland. And yes, that image is, I think, psychologically very intentional.
Celibacy pledges and youth marriage guarantee that young women are under male control for their entire procreative lives. And it is about control.
But I am old enough to remember the 'scandal' that came from the membership (UK) of PIE of NCCL in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
(Paedophile Information Exchange / National Council for Civil Liberties)
NCCL had a number of well known labour politicians on the board. The Guardian ran various articles about paedophiles infiltrating the left and hijacking campaigns.
The most prominent campaigner against PIE was a conservative MP - Geoffrey Dickens.
And while I see and share the concerns that are being expressed on this thread, I'm developing this itch to remind people once again that "conservatism" is not a monolithic position, that it is possible to be a conservative and not subscribe to the abuses under discussion, and so forth and so on. I'm probably wasting my time, but anyone interested might look at my old thread, "One type of conservatism: mine.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/conservatism/General-characteristics
I don't for a moment think all or even most conservatives think horrific abuses are okay. I do think that patriarchy makes those abuses more likely, and a fair number of conservatives support patriarchy. I think any hierarchy tends to promote abuse one way or another of the people on the lower rungs.
I will grant that I'm being a little simplistic. There are certainly healthier ways to appropriate tradition, and nowadays I think liberals and conservatives are both drawing on different established sources, so the narrative is rather confused.
I am also reminded of my old gripe that the whole "liberal/conservative" dichotomy is a 19th century construct that is rapidly outgrowing its usefulness, and "fascist/antifascist" should really be the priority now. I do think fascism in its current incarnation is more of a conservative excess - and not one that I think should be laid at the feet of every conservative faction, let alone person - but I think the focus should be anti-fascist rather than making this another "let's dogpile the conservatives" party.
While I don't think I self-ID as conservative (some folks might tag me as such at certain ranges,) I do not think those are interesting or worthwhile.
I read “backwards looking” as a value statement rather a straight-up definition. It stands in opposition to “looking forward.” “Backwards looking” is not how conservatism is defined in a dictionary. Rather, it’s how conservatism looks to many, especially those who do not share a conservative outlook.
S.J Woolf's Fascism in Europe contains chapters by different experts examining how fascism manifested itself in different European countries in the inter-war period.