In her celebrated book Harmful to Minors, Levine (2002) concluded with this profound but rarely expressed insight:
Sex is not harmful to children. It is a vehicle to self-knowledge, love, healing, creativity, adventure, and intense feelings of aliveness. . . . Our moral obligation to the next generation is to make a world in which every child can partake safely, a world in which the needs and desires of every child . . . can be marvelously fulfilled (p. 225).
One can not raise a fulfilled child when a chunk of their humanity is ruthlessly denied them, when their dignity is unrecognized by the depraved and the dried up. One can not call a starving child full. One can not call a child whose asexuality has been forced on them, fulfilled.
Adults have power by the position they've granted themselves in society. Children have control though, over themselves and their immediate environments. Even if a child is strapped down, their ability to control the hearts and minds and the weaknesses of adults remains in check, given to them by adults for their lower, demeaning status in society, and taken for themselves in spite of it. Thus, it stands to reason that the adult is constantly at war with the child's ability to flex their control, and the child is at war with the adult's ability to exert their power.
The power of the adult is brought on like an overwhelming force, it exudes from their pores, taking with it all of its purely socially constructed edifice--the "this is how it is" stamped firmly on the ground like a boot print after a stomping. It is something very physical, very absolute, like God's word, and doesn't hold itself up to question. Inversely, the control that children hold over themselves is internal, it comes forth in their cuteness, and like nymphets and faunlets, they use it to their advantage to gain the favors of adults. They take control by disobeying the overwhelming force, if not directly, subtle and meticulously. They are the insurgency.
Children use cuteness as a means to gain access to an adult's weaknesses, just as adults jump on children's weaknesses to exert power over them. And with recent research suggesting the same parts of the brain are activated when responding to something cute as when responding to something sexually appealing, it's becoming very easy to determine what motivates an adult to do such. Dominating a child's cuteness stimulates reward centers in the adult's brain. The feminists are fond of saying that all sex is merely an act of conquest, and if it's true, then we can understand why child abuse is never going away. They're addicted to the drug of power. They'll slay the dragon and then be the ones putting on the claws. By attacking predators and not granting children the ability to control their dignity, they are only pleasuring themselves.
They are taking from the slug perverts what is socially evil, and using it to exert for themselves over children what is socially acceptable, for the very same reason--pleasure.
What we believe is that children should not only understand the amazing control they have over themselves and their destiny, and over other people, just like any other human being, but also find the power connected to being small. Advertisers have known for as long as there have been advertisers that picturing a sweet-looking child can make an adult spend money. Governments know that invoking children, or depicting children in advertisements can influence the passage of almost any legislation or even help in the election of our leaders (see ad "Daisy" 1964). The media knows that depicting a child is a ratings booster, normally if the child is depicted as traditionally helpless.
Despite all this popular usage, if children could be made aware that their cute face can melt the heart of an adult, get them to swoon and smile, get them to lend an organization money or not shoot a dictator when surrounded by the likes of them, then there is power in that face. Power that is given, controls, but control that is taken, is powerful.
Maybe it's contributing subtle, well written and difficult to refute points to wikipedia. Perhaps it is anonymously engaging groups in thought experiments, or exposing irrational issues surrounding the periphery of the topics like sex offender registries, or Megans' Law or "Amber Alerts" in the US, but each point of refutation is a cut at the thick skin of indifference.
We want a delusional belief system to die "the death of a thousand cuts", and since we lack the resources to nuke it, the alternatives are few. One potential hazard to this multi-pronged attack approach is that, almost inevitably, we will wind up shooting some of our own side in the ensuing crossfire. There are shibboleths enshrined in that delusional belief system - the veneration of childhood is one instance. If society and the law is to treat with kids as fully functioning people, it must first set aside this faux-Victorian adoration of childhood, and its supposed "innocence".
The sex-negative culture can be attacked without any mention of P. The promulgation of victimhood can be attacked, without any mention of P. The surveillance society, and over-intrusive law. The nanny culture which smothers children in a straitjacket of "protection", shutting off from them most avenues of socialising outside the home--the paranoid "vetting" of any adult who wishes to work with children. It's not hard to draw up the various prongs of an attack.
I've used "antichrist" almost interchangeably with vigilante, exploiter, and molester. It's a label and like any label it's meant to be something flung out at a group of people with the intention of keeping it stuck to their foreheads. There are none wreaking havoc on innocent civilians with the intention of hurting child molesters that are in it for the well-being of children, and it's important for society to realize this. And because there is no more vilified force in human existence than Satan, to work conflating these so-called well-meaning propagandists waging war with society's common sense with such a prestigious force is simply to be fighting fire with fire in hopes that their whole "plan for victory" will end up in cinders charred by their own flame once all of society has been consumed.
It's a label, let's not forget that. Human beings invent labels to pin on certain people to conflate them with social menaces in order to achieve political power, or just social influence. If this is how people work, if this is what causes them to see "predators" where there are none and to see love where there are predators, labeling the real predators in the world "antichrists" should be sure to cause them to, for once, call a spade a spade. Who the cap fits, let them wear it.
The child abuse entertainment industry is a parasite that hatches in a healthy human brain and causes them to believe the industry, by provoking their sympathetic nerves with careful editing, zooms and fades, is actually on the side of the child. Nancy Grace tricked the majority of America into believing Headline News was on the side of the little girl kidnapped and killed by just showing the girl's cute face repeatedly for months. By doing this, hundreds of thousands were hypnotized into attending the five year old's funeral, a girl they would never have known if not for the industry's quest for their ratings and viewership, and advertising patronage of course. This is an antichrist. Vigilantes and child molesters, yes, them too.
It has been argued that the most primitive emotion is fear. This is because fear is what alerts our senses to danger in the environment and gives us the energy and impulse to react in ways that could potentially assist in our individual survival. In this basic schematic, we could understand love and hate as primal orientations to and away from that which is being feared. What is loved is that which we perceive as ensuring survival, and what is hated is that which we perceive as endangering us, and by framing this simple analogy out, we have a basic mechanism for the motivation behind every human activity. What is pleasing is assumed better for our survival, and what is hated is assumed hazardous to our survival.
It is then no question that these three fundamental starting points play into how society manages to raise its children. What is deemed hazardous is hated, and what is deemed helpful is loved. What is better for the child's survival is loved and what is aversive to it is feared. This would be all well and good if human nature were as binary as a computer, incapable of seeing a hazard where none exist and inflicting harm on the child in the process, or failing to see a hazard where there is one, also allowing harm onto the child. Because we are as children and fail in our reasoning, we cushion our lapses in judgment with punitive laws set to eliminate the need for reason. These are called "line in the sand" laws, because a line can be drawn at any point along a beach and these determinations are arbitrary, yet just as definitive. The age of consent, for instance, is designed to eliminate the need to reason about whether a child is ready for sex, because they are when the law says they are.
This protects the adult from having to worry about a child having sex when they are not ready--a potential hazard. It justifies the hatred of those who would cross the boundary even on the youth's request, and the love of those who would enforce this law. The one thing it doesn't do is protect the child. Because such line in the sand judgments are built on assumptions, it is the assumption itself that inflicts the most harm on the child--the assumption that they are all equally incapable until the law deems them ready. Instead of seeing this as an opportunity to educate the child to reach "readiness" by the time the law would determine them to be legally ready, they see this line in the sand as the essence of "readiness" in and of itself.
The youth's questions go unanswered because they have not reached the line yet, they "aren't old enough." Everything is done to make sure the youth is not ready by the time they are supposed to be ready. Readiness is essential for survival though. Would the parent of any mammal species that nurtures its young to adulthood as humans do be wise to withhold information from its young about how to find food, or how to avoid detection? What if such a law were established, on the basis of misguided fear, that established no bird could fly until a certain number of weeks had passed, irregardless of capability, and upon which date would be then expected to fly with ease? How long would they survive in the wild?
The bottom line is, there is the world governed by fear and hate, and then there is the world governed by common sense, which is ultimately a world governed by love. By showing respect for the growing capacities of youth and just a mindful observance toward potential hazards, we are showing them the greatest love because we are not being governed by fear.
Imagine an inter-generational pairing, a child and an adult, out in public enjoying each other's company on a special occasion. The adult is pampering, buying gifts, and the two are spotted eating out at a restaurant. Maybe it is a birthday celebration, maybe it's just the kid's last day of school for the year. Imagine public displays of affection, flirting, walking hand in hand, and then imagine that this adult has no legal ownership of this child, nor in any way are the two related. Now you cringe.
Society does not know how to deal with that. The kind of culture we have is not ready for that. They're confused about what kind of person would do such a thing as described with a child (a piece of property owned by someone else), and their reactions are confused, like someone who encounters an entirely new species, similar to the portrayal (in film) of an archetypal plot of clash of interests over a new discovery - be it an ancient city, a new scientific discovery, a new alien species, a new bug, a monstrous organism or whatever. What do we do with it?
Some want to destroy it, some want to contain it, some want to preserve it and let it loose, some want to leave it alone entirely, while some want to exploit it. You'd think CL's are as cockroaches to human dwellings as bugs in human form. They're seen as an infestation upon a healthy host, something that is inserting itself where it doesn't belong. What we see in reality does not match what culture impregnates in our imagination. The sentimentalism of the theatre inserts itself upon the realities of life, and the child and adult at the table are no longer a child and adult enjoying an evening, but a vermin eyeing down a useless lump of helplessness.
While people acknowledge that they cannot make the CL extinct, they want to contain them as much as possible, or at least the inhuman part of their own projections--born out of their own inner urges. Few people proudly profess their love and in doing so kill the urges, many denounce the few and let their urges run amok, calling cockroaches where there are none and ignoring the fat one on their own plate.
The "it takes a village" mentality is simply that, a mentality, rather than a viable alternative. In many ways, children are raised by the village. They spend far more time interacting with teachers, peers, and social media (internet, television...etc) than they do by their parents. Acknowledging the fact that parents only play a small part in the raising of their children doesn't diminish the fact that for institutional purposes, the child requires someone to claim responsibility for them. This purely legal responsibility is then magnified and made sacred by that so-called "hallowed co-relation" (as Marx described it) attributed to parents by our culture, and outside influences such as non-parent mentors and lovers, though numerous, are seen as dangerous to that socially contrived relationship between parent and child.
Responsibility breeds possessive contempt. Being responsible for an object or a human being, makes the person called upon suspicious of outside contamination. If we view "the village" as a collection of individuals for which a child can develop meaningful relationships within society, rather than a faceless "everywhere" ghost parent that can't assume responsibility for its mistakes (as is seen in the case of state care), the village concept lends justification to the ambitions of those with a desire to give of themselves for the benefit of their young friends.
As a concept, rather than a contrived social institution, the village concept for child raising lends justification to CLs to pick up and nurture the children fallen through its own cracks as just one of the collection of individuals. These cracks are formed when that which is invested in an institution "responsible" for raising children does not meet what is demanded of it. Because nobody demands anything of a CL, they are poised to befriend the children dropped by the system that couldn't live up to its expectations.
The village concept works even when it doesn't.
There's obviously a distinction here between providing a service for a child on that contractual, legal, professional basis and providing a service on the basis of pure devotion and charity. Both are required to enhance a child's life for different reasons and an overabundance of one over the other is bound to run a child's developmental trajectory in less appealing ways. Those who are responsible are providing a service, parents are providing a service for society--they are essentially entrusted to be to human beings what farmers are to crops. Farmers do not have control over the rain or the sunlight, but the work to ensure their crops get plenty of both and fill in the gaps when nature fails them. The family is a unit specialized into generating product for society in the form of a fully capable individual ready to perform all essential social functions for itself at its 18th birthday. To assist in doing this, governments have established their own water and sun in the form of compulsory schooling, state care, and other services.
But that's all that is involved in providing a service on the basis of legal requirement. A child who is nurtured in such an environment will not necessarily grow healthy, even if they are provided with schooling or adequate child care. A child is not a sedentary plant that just absorbs whatever goes into it, but an entity capable of making its own impact on its environment. What a child is capable of doing is superfluous to the society providing a contractual service, because to them, all that they require the child to be is something which can sit and receive the service. Thus children are grown like plants, absorbing water and sunlight, when in reality, their mobility alone produces a whole new dimension of care that society simply can not provide. In a system that necessitates their passivity, their activity can not be provided for no matter how much it necessitates it. So there is an impasse between what a child needs and what society needs, and it begins and ends with the child being a human being.
CLs provide a non-contractual service principally invested in allowing for a child's human qualities to expand once their basic legal requirements are provided for by responsible entities. Together, these two sides work together to satisfy a child's needs both as a social being and as a repository for services.
