Unfortunately, you're very wrong in saying that even a conservative Congressman or PTA member would admit to admiring the beauty of youth. Certainly not teenage boys. Certainly not Justin Bieber. A middle-aged woman might, without suffering reproach, say that he's a cutie -- but a middle-aged man who professed that he found his beauty spellbinding would certainly be shunned. But beyond that, I mean, listen -- I've read about fathers who are petrified even of cradling their young daughters because it feels "wrong," or they're afraid that someone will see it in the wrong way. This is a horrid situation.
We suffer from a horrid lack of aesthetics. Everything is viewed in this mechanical way; erotic beauty is never seen as rewarding the mind or the eye -- only the penis. Which is absurd. This has always been one of America's key flaws: its aversion to the humanities. We're a very practical people, so we tend to shy away from practices like philosophy, art, and literature.
You're definitely right that the vitality of youth is key to unlocking its erotic elements. The beautiful boy can do what his admirers can't; he is agile, energetic, engrossed in possibility. His identity is not yet fully formed; he is still in need of guidance. It's fragile. To fuck him is almost to ruin his purity (anal sex between men and teenage boys was never seen as acceptable in Ancient Greece, despite the images evoked by pederasty).
OK, I have more, but I need to go right now...dinner with a friend. She's bugging me. Bye-bye.
" Maybe you should learn to act similarly in relation to people younger than yourself."
You want me to cut some slack to people younger than I am? What do you mean?
Oh, gosh. "Playing fair." Stop that. I'll reply; I'm too narcissistic not to. And it's a fair audience, unlike, say, at RightWingNews.com, so I'll give it a whack.
Um, I just spent twenty-some minutes penning another comment, but it was sent to the spam filter. Please rescue it. I think it was sent there because I posted a link to a picture of Justin Bieber.
I should note, first, that "CHILF" is a self-aware joke about jailbait. 15-17. Certainly not "children," and certainly sexually aware.
I hope that I never develop a "self-censor." I actually am what leftists pretend to be: someone who has committed to living an open life, always searching for boundaries to push -- both in the abstract and in daily life. I've done nothing wrong, and I feel no need to be demure about it. The far-right can shove a knife up its collective ass, for all I care. Dirt under my feet!
A note on Justin Bieber: he is, physically, an archetypal beautiful boy in the Greek mode. At twenty, it is still fairly socially acceptable to find him attractive -- at least outside of far-right circles -- but I don't imagine that my tendencies -- which are aesthetic as much as they are sexual -- will diminish. (I know scores of gay men, young and old, who agree with me; few are public about it -- they're all petrified by public scorn, proving that incentives do work.) You'd have to have no aesthetic sense at all to deny the natural beauty at work: http://www.teenidols4you.com/blink/Actors/justinbieber/justinbieber_1286729393.jpg
Interestingly, this does seem to be an anti-gay thing: our culture scorns the heterosexual 'dirty old man,' but he is not seen as a freak of nature: only as someone who cannot control his urges. At twenty -- I mean, I'm twenty years old! -- I find Justin Bieber, sixteen, both beautiful and sexually desirable -- and am deemed by many people to have a serious problem. Besides being totally out-of-sync with all of history, psychology, and biology, this is quite a bizarre double-standard. (It may also have something about how the male adolescent is viewed.)
Our post-Cold War pedophile panic has conflated child-rape with traditional reverence toward the spellbinding beauty of youth. Not children, I should note, but youth -- post-pubescent, sexually aware, but still in retention of certain feminine or childish qualities. Half of you is compelled to fuck him; the other half wants to worship his evanescent, androgynous beauty: nature's art. That's very different than the pedophile's tendencies. The true pedophile is caged-in, I think, because there is nothing sexually-aware about the prepubescent child: it's not that children are devoid of sexuality, necessarily, but that the child lacks the awareness of meaning. He's not ready. (The child can be beautiful, of course, but not, I think, in any erotic way.)
I personally find nothing erotic about prepubescent children, but our public discourse about this issue amounts to nothing short of hysteria. We have to find a rational way to discuss this. This To-Catch-a-Predator paradigm is not productive.
All cultures have rightly condemned true child-rape. But our current conflation of true pedophilia with the natural masculine desire for youth and beauty is disturbing and regressive. It's a product, I think, of a bizarre cultural shift wherein we now consider adolescents to be 'big children' rather than young adults. There's an artificial extension of childhood going on in America: walk onto any college campus and you'll see what I mean. It's not healthy -- not intellectually, not emotionally, not sexually.
I'll stop there; I've rambled too much.
Can you see why I have no real home on the right, though? Lol.
@Scott Miller -- Don't be a twit. Pigeonholing me as a "conservative" -- in the way that it's understood today, at least -- is ludicrous. I am an ardent atheist, pro-drug legalization, pro-pornography, pro-prostitution, pro-abortion rights, pro-art, in favor of reducing the age of consent, and do not believe in 'natural rights.' If these beliefs put me in the same camp as, say, Sarah Palin, then we have surely arrived at an odd definition of conservatism.
I've allied with the right because of my skepticism toward centralized power and my belief that prudence is the statesman's supreme value. Additionally, my economic and legal conservatism are fairly 'pure' in their first principles. But I have little in common with the likes of Mark Levin. The trouble I run into, you see, is that I also have little in common with the likes of Rachel Maddow. I'm politically and culturally homeless in the false left-right dichotomy. I'll have to forge my own path; I really have no choice. I'm summoned by nature to be a writer, and, as a commentator, I aspire to be something of a performance artist. I'm inspired by the likes of Paglia, Rand, Hitchens: true contrarians, always confident -- even braggadocious -- and never enslaved by dogma or orthodoxy.
Finally, I'm not here to congratulate Mr. MacLeod for his skill as a writer. If a person injects himself into the public arena, there's an expectation that he should be able to write in prose that's clear and even rewarding. I'm not going to pin a blue ribbon to his shirt for doing what he should be doing, anyway. I'm too busy bludgeoning people who can't do what they say they can.
Just performing my daily Google search of myself. Thought I'd drop a note since, unlike most people, you actually seem to be capable of penning a coherent sentence about this subject.
The "Twelve Days of Pedophilic Christmas" has, alas, like just about everything in Swindle's hit piece, been misrepresented: written when I was 19, the parody poem expresses my lust for guys ranging from ages 16 to 21. "Pedophilia," indeed.
My burgeoning career on the Right is over, but for months now, I've known that my future is not within right-wing media. You'll be hearing more from me: don't you worry about that. That is: I actually do happen to believe what I write -- the proper reaction to this exposure is not to throw myself off of a bridge, but to hit the warpath. I'm increasingly angry not at the smears, but at the insane view of sex that underlies them. More soon (though not on here. Give it a couple of weeks).
Unfortunately, you're very wrong in saying that even a conservative Congressman or PTA member would admit to admiring the beauty of youth. Certainly not teenage boys. Certainly not Justin Bieber. A middle-aged woman might, without suffering reproach, say that he's a cutie -- but a middle-aged man who professed that he found his beauty spellbinding would certainly be shunned. But beyond that, I mean, listen -- I've read about fathers who are petrified even of cradling their young daughters because it feels "wrong," or they're afraid that someone will see it in the wrong way. This is a horrid situation.
We suffer from a horrid lack of aesthetics. Everything is viewed in this mechanical way; erotic beauty is never seen as rewarding the mind or the eye -- only the penis. Which is absurd. This has always been one of America's key flaws: its aversion to the humanities. We're a very practical people, so we tend to shy away from practices like philosophy, art, and literature.
You're definitely right that the vitality of youth is key to unlocking its erotic elements. The beautiful boy can do what his admirers can't; he is agile, energetic, engrossed in possibility. His identity is not yet fully formed; he is still in need of guidance. It's fragile. To fuck him is almost to ruin his purity (anal sex between men and teenage boys was never seen as acceptable in Ancient Greece, despite the images evoked by pederasty).
OK, I have more, but I need to go right now...dinner with a friend. She's bugging me. Bye-bye.
You want me to cut some slack to people younger than I am? What do you mean?
Oh, gosh. "Playing fair." Stop that. I'll reply; I'm too narcissistic not to. And it's a fair audience, unlike, say, at RightWingNews.com, so I'll give it a whack.
Um, I just spent twenty-some minutes penning another comment, but it was sent to the spam filter. Please rescue it. I think it was sent there because I posted a link to a picture of Justin Bieber.
@CK --
I should note, first, that "CHILF" is a self-aware joke about jailbait. 15-17. Certainly not "children," and certainly sexually aware.
I hope that I never develop a "self-censor." I actually am what leftists pretend to be: someone who has committed to living an open life, always searching for boundaries to push -- both in the abstract and in daily life. I've done nothing wrong, and I feel no need to be demure about it. The far-right can shove a knife up its collective ass, for all I care. Dirt under my feet!
A note on Justin Bieber: he is, physically, an archetypal beautiful boy in the Greek mode. At twenty, it is still fairly socially acceptable to find him attractive -- at least outside of far-right circles -- but I don't imagine that my tendencies -- which are aesthetic as much as they are sexual -- will diminish. (I know scores of gay men, young and old, who agree with me; few are public about it -- they're all petrified by public scorn, proving that incentives do work.) You'd have to have no aesthetic sense at all to deny the natural beauty at work: http://www.teenidols4you.com/blink/Actors/justinbieber/justinbieber_1286729393.jpg
Interestingly, this does seem to be an anti-gay thing: our culture scorns the heterosexual 'dirty old man,' but he is not seen as a freak of nature: only as someone who cannot control his urges. At twenty -- I mean, I'm twenty years old! -- I find Justin Bieber, sixteen, both beautiful and sexually desirable -- and am deemed by many people to have a serious problem. Besides being totally out-of-sync with all of history, psychology, and biology, this is quite a bizarre double-standard. (It may also have something about how the male adolescent is viewed.)
Our post-Cold War pedophile panic has conflated child-rape with traditional reverence toward the spellbinding beauty of youth. Not children, I should note, but youth -- post-pubescent, sexually aware, but still in retention of certain feminine or childish qualities. Half of you is compelled to fuck him; the other half wants to worship his evanescent, androgynous beauty: nature's art. That's very different than the pedophile's tendencies. The true pedophile is caged-in, I think, because there is nothing sexually-aware about the prepubescent child: it's not that children are devoid of sexuality, necessarily, but that the child lacks the awareness of meaning. He's not ready. (The child can be beautiful, of course, but not, I think, in any erotic way.)
I personally find nothing erotic about prepubescent children, but our public discourse about this issue amounts to nothing short of hysteria. We have to find a rational way to discuss this. This To-Catch-a-Predator paradigm is not productive.
All cultures have rightly condemned true child-rape. But our current conflation of true pedophilia with the natural masculine desire for youth and beauty is disturbing and regressive. It's a product, I think, of a bizarre cultural shift wherein we now consider adolescents to be 'big children' rather than young adults. There's an artificial extension of childhood going on in America: walk onto any college campus and you'll see what I mean. It's not healthy -- not intellectually, not emotionally, not sexually.
I'll stop there; I've rambled too much.
Can you see why I have no real home on the right, though? Lol.
@Scott Miller -- Don't be a twit. Pigeonholing me as a "conservative" -- in the way that it's understood today, at least -- is ludicrous. I am an ardent atheist, pro-drug legalization, pro-pornography, pro-prostitution, pro-abortion rights, pro-art, in favor of reducing the age of consent, and do not believe in 'natural rights.' If these beliefs put me in the same camp as, say, Sarah Palin, then we have surely arrived at an odd definition of conservatism.
I've allied with the right because of my skepticism toward centralized power and my belief that prudence is the statesman's supreme value. Additionally, my economic and legal conservatism are fairly 'pure' in their first principles. But I have little in common with the likes of Mark Levin. The trouble I run into, you see, is that I also have little in common with the likes of Rachel Maddow. I'm politically and culturally homeless in the false left-right dichotomy. I'll have to forge my own path; I really have no choice. I'm summoned by nature to be a writer, and, as a commentator, I aspire to be something of a performance artist. I'm inspired by the likes of Paglia, Rand, Hitchens: true contrarians, always confident -- even braggadocious -- and never enslaved by dogma or orthodoxy.
Finally, I'm not here to congratulate Mr. MacLeod for his skill as a writer. If a person injects himself into the public arena, there's an expectation that he should be able to write in prose that's clear and even rewarding. I'm not going to pin a blue ribbon to his shirt for doing what he should be doing, anyway. I'm too busy bludgeoning people who can't do what they say they can.
Just performing my daily Google search of myself. Thought I'd drop a note since, unlike most people, you actually seem to be capable of penning a coherent sentence about this subject.
The "Twelve Days of Pedophilic Christmas" has, alas, like just about everything in Swindle's hit piece, been misrepresented: written when I was 19, the parody poem expresses my lust for guys ranging from ages 16 to 21. "Pedophilia," indeed.
My burgeoning career on the Right is over, but for months now, I've known that my future is not within right-wing media. You'll be hearing more from me: don't you worry about that. That is: I actually do happen to believe what I write -- the proper reaction to this exposure is not to throw myself off of a bridge, but to hit the warpath. I'm increasingly angry not at the smears, but at the insane view of sex that underlies them. More soon (though not on here. Give it a couple of weeks).