Deviant Power

There's one variety of CL, and it's the "criminalized existence" variety. It seems to prevail. It prevails because it's deeply drenched existentialism at it's core. It's rooted in being a social outcast--not just to particular groups (like homosexuality, women's and civil rights movements) but to all of society, including all of the above.

To love a child, that isn't your own, is to be an outcast of humanity. It means one is prepared to turn their back on the humanity of adulthood to spend time in the inhuman realm of the child. This is why activism is doomed. Unless one can appeal to any children's tribunals to resist the inevitable onslaught of the adult, intensely interested in why you would willingly shun their flashy civilization for the savagery of the child, you do not have a chance of resistance. Children don't have tribunals, they don't have a built-in support structure for you to carry out your movement against western culture. Therefore, your activism will have no ripples outside the life of the child.

Homosexuals, women, and blacks have support structures they can rely on to carry their message (namely, other blacks, women, and human rights groups respectively). The CL only has other CLs, and possibly anarchists--both are pariahs. In the face of despair and defeat, they build themselves up to be stronger than their mainstream counterparts who are reliant on society's acceptance. The weak need something to rely on. Those who are forced into a corner have only themselves.

Existentialism is something that despaired people tend to cling onto once they've lost faith in all the "truth" of the world. If alienation is that prime result of all the dogmatic sentimental extravagance that defines adult life, alienation is precisely what the CL projects back towards society. They serve more as a mirror held up in the face of a society that believes its principles regarding children so true, universal, and ethical, that no alternative can exist, that no harm caused by their ruthless application can be unjustified. In turn, just the sight of their own alienation stuck back in their face causes nothing less than physical weakness. That is the power they give pedophiles over society.

The outcast is the last person to cower in the face of false idols when they fall. They don't run to chase the shade when the sun turns a shadow as it sets. Being neglected so long by those who chase the shadows, they've learned how to stare at the sun and not be blinded.

Shadows and Tall Trees

The only thing worse than the bigoted media is the mechanism by which people begin to convince themselves that what it prostrates is a permissible representation of reality. It's a waltz of back and forth, a symbiotic relationship where ratings both feed from and manipulate the culture's perceptions. It is the mechanism whereby a fictional exaggeration, the 'bumbling dad' for instance, influences the cultural perception of the typical, and whereby a tragic accident by negligence inspires hyper-vigilance that in turn creates hazards out of harmlessness.

How many children will be caught in the crossfire of those poised on the rooftops to protect them by shooting at shadows?

Shadows are a flat, formless non-entity, false representation of the thing casting them, and depending on where the sun is located, they are either significantly shortened (and therefore less frightening than their owners), or they are exaggerations--significantly enlarged. When it comes to children, every peg that could cause them to trip in the high grass casts a ten foot shadow in the media realm as if the sun were resting eternally on the horizon. Even if humanity matched the size of their fear with the size of the thing being feared, it would still be nothing but a fear of a shadow--a formless entity.

As for the child's shadow, it's safe to assume it's a perpetual noon, as the shadow of the child (considerably larger than the peg), has been inherited its shadow's shortness. We over-estimate dangers and under-estimate resolve. Adults fear the impediments more than they do the relative effects of a peg coming into contact with a child, and this is done on the basis that because it has been oft repeated, it must be true. This is called a fallacy. A shadow is still just empty air, fearing it will not intimidate that which is casting it.

Girls are the Future?

The economic superstructure has a dwindling need for boys. They are a shrinking market, and therefore an economically undervalued group. Besides video games and certain toys, there are increasingly fewer things that are marketed explicitly "for boys," since to do so would be to displace girls who might be interested in those markets. But have the markets reached this conclusion out of shifting attitudes about "girl power," or have they done so for economical reasons? That is to say, in girls marketers have a base that includes what continues to be the traditional girl media (the color pink), but also other varieties of "girl expression," and girls are therefore expected to be more active "buyers" across these multiple markets as a result. Boys have been shown to be a limited, almost niche market, so companies often don't see the reason to put up the money to cater to them specifically. Anything they do market with boys in mind must also consider possible girl buying power.

This is because girls are also both more likely and more encouraged to branch outside the narrow range of media designed for traditional girlhood. Products and companies originally steeped in selling to the traditional boyhood interests are finding that their limited target is vestigial, as they could just as well survive off the varied interests of their counterparts (who they value more due to the socially perceived penchant for materialism). Thus, if girls could be said to be the future, we know what gave them such a distinction -- the free hand of the market has thrown them into the social limelight, despite that cumbersome "stuffy-old" equality standard.

On the contrary to the egalitarian pleas, we routinely observe that it's far more edgy, fun, and (as we shall observe) sexy, to be girl-centric (at least, that's how the market would have it). Girl empowerment these days is a reflection of a newly spawned cultural standard born from an economic landscape that the stewards of culture (advertisers and products) are betting fortunes on. It doesn't really matter whether girls are indeed the future so long as they believe the line enough to dip their hands into whatever market is trying to pep them up for their purchase power. Likewise, if today's boys are to play second-fiddle in the future, such will have been accomplished because pockets were lined from their systematic devaluation today across all media. Why else would children's media extol the benefits of being a "good, clean, fashionable, trendy, diverse, intelligent, sporty, and empowered" girl, over being one of those "lazy, stupid, smelly, disgusting, hyper, non-fashionable, old-fashioned, slimy snip and snail" boys? That is, unless they weren't trying to cater to that sex's ego.

These so-called new gender expectations are not so new after all though. In fact, they represent the same mechanism of thought that has always existed -- that being, coddle the girls, make sure they are greeted with nothing but positivity and encouragement because they can't handle real criticism, and belittle the boys, because doing so makes them strong, and they can just weather any storm. Despite this, the feminist reaction to this social phenomenon has been mixed, with the extremes under the belief that society has finally "arrived" on the route to economically induced "payback" that the new generation should be forced to foot the bill for, and the wide majority taking a more moderate approach -- stressing individual need over coddling anyone, but generally being unconcerned. It is no question where their bias lies, along with their credibility, as whenever girls are being devalued in this culture, we certainly do hear about it and all of its injustice. Then again, there should be no question what side a feminist will take -- it is in their name.

Regardless, research has been on a crusade lately to confirm these new social expectations created by the stewards of culture, and so in the past 30 years, we've learned nothing else except how much more capable our daughters are -- to the point where it can hardly be called noteworthy anymore. Girls are smarter than boys, they get better grades at everything, have faster skill development, mature faster, have better sensory ability, have better life outcomes, go to college at greater frequencies, make for happier parents, work harder, make better friends, and almost any other trait you can imagine. All has been carefully researched, and so there are simply less and less reasons to conclude anything other than the fact that female children are superior creatures to male children. Indeed, parents, teachers, professionals, and ultimately, the market itself, have begun towing this conclusion, encouraging girls to be all they can be knowing of course that they really can be anything. Boys on the other hand can only be "boys." In the war between being anything and being a boy, girls rule.

It has become new, exciting, and sexy to assert girl superlatives as the norm, and relegate boys to the has-been pile. Now society roots for the girl to triumph, yes, but gives her the most praise and accolade when her triumph is seen as an usurpation, the overtaking of the male establishment, which is unfortunate for the "run-of-the-mill" triumphing girl that gets ignored. Society wants to prove to itself, even if it knows it to be wrong, that girls deserve not only to be triumphant, but more "importantly," to lay waste to their increasingly de-humanized and "unnecessary" alternatives. We get off on the spectacle of strong girl, insist she become that spectacle to our own enjoyment, using a boy as little more than a catalyst, a punching bag to pair off her achievements, but then fail to actually support her once she outgrows the bracket. It no longer feels all that sexy once those "meek little kiddies" who might have been swayed by "girl power" have grown up and have minds of their own, so we move on to the next group of offspring. The one thing nobody is willing to admit in all of this, is that everybody is getting off on the same sexual kink. That's all it is.

In the pursuit of this pleasure, we have piped up the girl's self-assurance in childhood to the point of anxiety and burnout by adolescence (they can not remain the perfect, all-important child forever), and sidelined the boy's enthusiasm to be the embarrassing joke it is until we are sure he has internalized it forever. The less important child has an ego to save against the onslaught. But the grand social experiment to degrade boys (and promote girl power on the side) has only succeeded as far as it has been paid for. The science about the sheer multiplicity of girl superlatives remains convincing, but if the goal is having girls on top of the perennial pyramid and truly ruling the world, more work has yet to be done. It feels good so far, but the climax is still coming.

Children are Sexual

"... we have examined the histories of 5300 males ... It would be difficult to show that masturbatory activities have done measurable damage.... On the other hand, the record does include thousands of boys living in continual conflict...occasionally attempting suicide--as a result of the teachings concerning masturbation."
(Kinsey et al., 1948, p. 514)

With the assumption that children aren't sexual, inevitably follows is the expectation that they are less than human. These criteria are intertwined--to unravel one is to destroy the unity of both. Denial has always been the strongest weapon waged against those who are subordinate from those who are in control--denial of the ability to procreate; denial of the ability to communicate; to travel; to be educated; to have money; to have human rights...etc.--and denial continues to be the weapon of choice used against young people for the purpose of maintaining adult power. The strongest one used in this day in age? The denial of children to their own sexuality. With it, children are turned into criminals waging war with their own flesh, and adults turned into heroes, waging war with the very same thing, justifying all the horrific recourse that follows on the grounds that doing such protects children.

The fact of the matter is, children enjoy pleasuring themselves, as all human beings do, and they enjoy pleasuring themselves sexually. Even if they don't have the terms to understand what form of pleasure the stimulation takes, the ability to feel pleasure exists. Nature does not cower at the feet of man, it doesn't kill off ugliness simply because mankind deems it ugly, and children are not born as asexual drones just because adults need something to subjugate and exploit.

However, the fact of the matter is that children, particularly smaller children, are not always aware of what their sexual feelings mean. This small fact is the jumping off point for all adult sexual oppression of children--whether forcing them into sexual assault or forcing them to ignore their impulses. Adults perceive the ability to procreate as the criterion for sexual capability, when in reality, it has more to do with sexual maturity. Imagine if children were prohibited from learning to walk (if such could be done) until some pre-set date where they were considered "mature" enough? Should we consider such a poor soul, as indicated, a mature individual? Maturity is an indication of learned experience, it is not a date on a calendar. Children mature mentally at different rates, so in spite of that, society is incorrect in its understanding that there can be one set standard, by which a law can be crafted on, that sets the legal age all youth completely understand the benefits, risks, and consequences of sex.

Just as rapists and child molesters are sexual deviants, the enforced celibacy children endure is one placed upon them by another kind of sexual deviant. It is not natural to inhumanly ignore sexual urges, burying them deep inside of oneself to be released in a rage of anticipated climax. It is not natural to allow sexual urges to overwhelm the rational and logical decisions, thereby allowing oneself to actively rape another human being, man or woman, adult or child. Both are on the end of a pendulum, neither one being centered, or in anyway near a balanced, "mature" normality. Childhood sexual fantasy is worthy to be explored in youth to create a healthier child and a sexually healthy adult later in life.

Repercussions will follow from these socially-created extremes, whether or not those sudden occurrences or emotional breakdowns are ever disclosed to anyone but oneself. Too many children have been forced to accommodate this abstinence against their will, causing too many to suffer the repercussions and emotional breakdowns later in their lives. Too many have been forced to accept sexual attention against their will because they were risen in a world where they must fear their adults in order to survive, and such action has caused repercussions and emotional breakdowns later in life. A balance must occur to end these learned repercussions regarding sexual expression, association of pride and love in one’s sexual feelings, and these balances must extend to childhood. Childhood sexual fantasy is worthy to be explored. It is part of what makes them human, whether we label them "children" or not.

The Downfall of Civilization

Marx famously stipulated that criticism of religion is the premise behind all social criticism, and it was because he never lived to see just where all that irrational zeal would go once it had been cut off to the heavens above. Since his time, people have turned society's youngest members into demi-gods, ascribing to them all the super-human powers of omni-benevolence and purity with the same degree of fervent zealotry--instigating the same amount of destruction with the same amount of good intention--as mankind ever has brought about--with hand on heart--as a result of religion or political ideology. Childhood is the new religion, the new ideology, and it's adherents can be found in all corners of the earth. So truly, criticism of it must be the basis for all social criticism in the 21st century.

While terrorism, the politics of preemption, corporate imperialism, the threat of environmental meltdown, fear politics, and the increasing dependence on technology are critical issues facing our world--and while extremist ideologies of the 20th century have mostly continued to fade--the one ideology still capable of gripping the heart so strongly as to starve it of oxygen and common sense (because it can not reside in the rational head for very long), is the ideology of the deification of the child and childhood. In fact, it has only grown in strength and numbers. When the death of a child means the birth of a saint, sparking a candlelight vigil of thousands, we can only expect to see more saints being born as the human children are fiendishly disposed of. The exalted status of a child's ghost, as depicted on the nightly news, only means the dehumanization of those still living.

In an age where one can depict terrorists as anti-heroes, suicide bombers as misunderstood romantics, murderers as sympathetic father/mother figures, and all so-called sexual deviancy as a celebrated triumph over intolerance and bigotry... in a world where it seems anything is permissible, human beings still react, as if wound by sensational clockwork, with breath-stealing dread, unspeakable horror, and vigilant blood lust, at the mere sight or thought of a non-parental adult ever being depicted holding a child's hand. All human rights are thrown in the wastebasket to ensure that such an image never permeates the social conscious ever again, as if such were a sure indication of the downfall of civilization. Such a divine aura still hangs over all children so strong that if ever seen penetrated, there is nothing stopping any onlooker's head from exploding.

This is a society where gore and obscenity is vindicated and the love of children on a personal level, adult to child, is demonized. The sight of an adult infiltrating the inflated holy realm of the child to simply hold hands is bound to send ripples of shock and horror down the spine of many a seasoned fan of unbridled, uncensored gore and promiscuity--more accustomed to seeing the torture and relentless gratification of the human body as an acceptable form of human expression than the gentle, nurturing compassion that can exist between adult and child. It often seems that civilization will resort back to watching human death and mutilation unfold before their eyes as entertainment before they will tolerate the non-parental love that can be shared between an adult and a child. They'll watch the bombing of a city, licking their lips with desire, before they tolerate the sight of a healthily sexualized child (because to be human is to be sexual).

Simply put, to love a child, to strip away what is pasted on them by a paranoid society with grace and dignity and bare their true spirits, is to be participating in the downfall of western civilization as it has worked centuries being established. To do it is to be driving the final nail in the coffin of established morality.

On Individual Choice

Choice for children is an illusion. The choices they are given have more to do with what is acceptable to the parent presenting the options than it does with children 'following their hearts' and any other such sentimental claptrap. This is not to say that an illusory choice is unfair, as complete freedom of choice for anyone is severely restricted, and just being granted the right to make it empowers and teaches them to use and form their own judgments, and--most importantly, suffer their own consequences (within reason). This is to say, choosing is always a learning experience.

Culture plays a big part in the degree to which a child's choice will be reinforced at any particular time, as eastern cultures tend to be more imperative and collectivist and western ones, more interrogative and individualistic. The idea of a child having choice at first appears to be something inspired by western individualism, however, in either culture, regardless of parenting methodologies, warmth, and cultural differences, trends regarding the child's choice are cyclical. It could be said that children in collectivist and individualistic societies are simply socialized to construct their individual wills likewise, to align with whatever the prevailing social trend is. It is inevitable that a thousand different influences (Bronfenbrenner) are going to converge on a child's will from birth and distort it, molest it, and mature it, until it is conformed with the cultural and historical modes of its society, and that with reinforcement, children will learn to bend their own will accordingly.

A child's evaluation of certain objects and activities has more to do with what the society that surrounds him or her values than it does anything particular to the characteristics of "childhood." If we lived in a society where anal sex in childhood was valued as much as we value the toy aisle, our children would love anal sex, and anal sex would be another so-called "pure" and innocent childhood pastime. There is nothing beautiful, pure, disgusting, or obscene, other than what adults have termed these things.

The former transition is one created by the socialization of the child by caregivers and the other contextual and ecological factors. However, it is also a child's human ability to resist the flow, and ultimately, this small resistance fuels the evolution of society, but such can only happen if they remain active players in the social game. Children who totally fail to bend their will to the expectations of society by the time they are developmentally expected are labeled disordered, or truant, or otherwise socialized in inappropriate ways, and they are effectively done away with. That is no exaggeration.

The ability of children to make the choice by which to structure their behavior, either in accordance or protest, highlights the reality of a child's humanity. And though parents seem to detest their children when they are either too eager to participate or too disobedient to comply, it is in those instances when the child is most human. If anything, those instances ought to be the most celebrated moments in a child's life. Unfortunately though, when a child's humanity interferes with an adult's authority, humanity is crushed.

Good Over Evil

The distortion of reality to fit sentimental politics is the work of the evil and the powerful, for which there is little to distinguish. We are who we are. The status of wrongdoings and the relative punishments human beings receive are inversely proportional to their size in the pond. The bigger they are, the easier it is for them to evade the repercussions of their actions, and therefore, the the easier it is to justify their lives by the laws--to play the moral high ground. We are the small fish, being eaten by the big fish, and we don't want to be justified.

Sensationalism is the greatest force of evil in existence, because unlike any material object (such as money), its evil property is not ascribed to it by human beings. For instance, there is nothing evil about money in and of itself, it is a material or conceptual thing that, without human interference, is incapable of being evil. Sensationalism on the other hand is bread out of human nature, it can not be independent of it. It is the intentional manipulation of not just information, but of the fallible human psyche, to produce an intended response from another human being. It is the molestation of another individual's will for furtherance of one's own, masquerading itself as objective.

Objectivity is a fruitless pursuit, but however impossible it may be to be completely objective when reporting on the affairs of the world, it will never justify, as is often made the case by the media, the intentional deception of the public--the manipulation of the public's trust. The powerful are in no position to play the moral high ground simply because they are powerful, when reporting on the crimes of rogue, powerless individuals like pedophiles committing crimes.

For the small fish, there is no greater honor than to be found guilty by the wicked, it simply means that you're doing something right. When the crime one is being accused of only happened in the minds of your accusers, who were influenced by the sentimental sensationalism ubiquitous in society, then one is only guilty of offending their weak minds with individual strength. Such a thing is greeted as a sign of victory among the rogues.

The prosecution of harm where no harm has happened with draconian sentencing that destroys a person's existence, as well as the existence of their family--including their children--is nothing more than pent-up passive aggression funneling itself into the likeness of the one being accused--the scapegoat for society's repression. The repression of society is evil, and though evil exists among the powerful and the powerless, it's one that is perpetrated almost exclusively by the biggest fish. It's effects drip down and corrupt every segment of civilization, and while it may all seem clean and business-like, the transactions taking place among the powerful, each cover-up blood-dollar finds its inevitable repercussion further down the food chain in the face of the beast the sensationalist media will portray as its scapegoat.

Only the guiltless have any moral high ground. What goes around, comes around. There are more of us than them.

It's Johnny's Birthday!

Child worship expresses itself in probably it's most overt ways within the modern family. In a classic framing exercise, we could easily picture mother and father as the child's clergy, busying themselves maintaining their idol, singing its praises, and saluting it on the yearly anniversary of it's birth with a grand festival, where "it" refers to inhuman nature of the thing being worshiped--something indeed quite beyond the physical organism that a child really is.

To be clear, celebrating birthdays is not wrong minded, but it could be argued that the degree of lavishness they assume (usually at the behest of parents more than anything else) is only a depiction of the modern fascination and obsession with blowing children up to twice their normal size. It's only amazing they can manage to keep their feet on the ground.

At one time only the wealthy sons and daughters of self-important dignitaries and noblemen celebrated something as mundane as the yearly milestone known as a birthday with lavish parties. In the modern world, that distinction is reserved for every child. It seems the younger and less aware the child is, the more lavish the festival commemorating their birth has to be. We give them Jumperoos on their second birthday and yet still don't allow them to vote by their 16th. We're very good at blowing children up to be demi-gods alright, we're just not very good at deflating them back down to our size.

And then we expect our adolescents to begin coming down from Olympus on their own, to live like people for the first time after being restricted within the socially constructed walls of heaven all their lives. Suffice it to say, when their eyes finally shoot open at first to the world made not of dreams but out of the fear and desperation surrounding them, only one reaction seems appropriate at first--disillusionment. Some get over it. Some don't.

And then for the sciences to suggest that such a reaction is biochemically induced in its entirety, rather than the inevitable result of a demigod stepping down from his golden throne, it only reeks of same preferential prejudice that failed to let him be human in his first 13 years of life. The fact of the matter is, as far as the perspective from which research on the maturation of teens is conducted (one of squinted-eye observation), the child is no longer a child, and therefore in no more need to be worshiped. Is it no coincidence that once "playtime is over," the demonization of young people begins?

(A tip to George Harrison in the title.)