Uncle Tom

 

Don't ask, don't tell

My mentally-retarded uncle was a bisexual pedophile. 

He is dead now; surely there is no harm in talking about it. 

To my knowledge, he molested one niece, three nephews, and a little girl next door. They say that pedophiles cannot reform; if true, I assume there were more. The family knew about it, but nothing was ever done about it.

His being a pedophile was predictable. He was always kept at home, never put in contact with other mentally-retarded people. He had no social life. He must have had sexual urges, as we all do. Where was he going to express them?

He harassed my mother, but that was not going to get him anywhere.

That sheer necessity explains his instincts jumping the fence against molesting children. Most of us would not be so tempted.

Yet, little girls being available, it does not explain jumping the second fence into homosexuality. 

By the reports I heard, he also seemed in his molestations to show some knowledge of gay sexual technique.

Being mentally retarded, and mostly sequestered, before the Internet, where did this come from?

If, as I posit in a previous posting, homosexual urges come from earliest sexual experiences, he must have been sexualized to this himself in early adolescence. And, given that he was kept away from any wider society, it seems to have come from someone inside the home—although some neighbourhood predator cannot be entirely ruled out.

He did not molest all his nephews, although all were more or less equally within his reach. He seemed to have a taste for blondes. All but one of those he did molest were quite fair of hair; so was the neighbour girl. The one dark-haired nephew he troubled with seems not to have been a favourite--he was left out of the will which Uncle Tom eventually somehow got drawn up. Others seemed to be rewarded in proportion to their perceived attractiveness. Not their cooperation, not their being “nice” to him. One of the biggest behests was to his sister-in-law, my mother, who always rejected his advances and avoided him whenever possible.

So it seems he would dally with a brunette in a pinch, but did not think much of them. Perhaps with my swarthy brother, it was just a one-night stand.

From this, we actually may have a portrait of the predator who sexualized the poor old guy. A male with blonde hair. With ready access.

Awkwardly enough, I have another uncle. Call him Teddy. For a time, he was an alcoholic, although he later, admirably, straightened himself out. He was at least three years older than Tom. He had blonde hair. He never married.

The fact that he didn’t marry is not, of course, proof that he was gay. He had girlfriends. If short of stature, with delicate features, he was a handsome man. He must have had many opportunities. I myself saw women flirt with him. At least a couple of times, he had a fiancée. But something always happened just before the wedding. 

Why did he never marry? Some men don’t; but it is a natural urge.

Teddy became an alcoholic by late adolescence. Again, why did he resort to escapism so early? What was troubling him?

It is suggestive. If he had gay urges, being gay was not okay in the 1940s; and with a strictly Catholic mother.  There were no obvious outlets. One had to keep it closeted. If some part of him were gay, no surprise if we never heard about it.

But what if you had a mentally retarded little brother around the house? He wouldn’t know enough to resist. He wouldn’t be easily able to complain to anyone; he wouldn’t dare tell his mother, even if he could understand. Boys experiment even at the best of times.

Getting drunk first might make it all easier.

I wonder. I speculate. They are both dead. Much damage has probably been done. And the truth died with them.

Free Woody Allen

Fake mug shot of Woody Allen from "Take the Money and Run."

I hate to talk about the private lives of celebrities. It is almost automatically the sin of calumny. Celebrities have the same right to privacy we all do; it is supposed to be a human right.

But I must speak out on Woody Allen, because a grave injustice is being done.

He is innocent.

Yet many people are protesting The Atlantic for even allowing his wife, Soon-Yi, to give her side of the story.

I am not a Woody Allen fan. I think his influence has been baleful. He is a disciple of Freud, and Freud has been a wrecking ball in our culture. But the man is innocent.

Allen is accused of assaulting his step-daughter Dylan, when she was seven. That's it.

This charge was looked into twice, by two independent authorities, in New York and Connecticut, and neither found any credible evidence to support the charge. Never even made it to court.

Moreover, Allen and Mia Farrow were in the middle of an acrimonious breakup when the incident was alleged to have happened. Faking a charge of child molestation is simply standard practice among unethical women in any divorce proceedings these days, to milk the husband for as much as possible in the settlement. If you are caught lying, there is no penalty; so there is no downside to doing it. Arguably, it is malpractice if your divorce lawyer does not advise it.

Dylan still insists it happened. But memories from age seven are intrinsically unreliable and subject to suggestion. Her testimony might be sincere, but it is worth nothing as evidence.

There are apparently no other allegations against Allen. This is significant, because according to the experts, pedopiles are compulsive. They never do it just once, with one victim.

Indeed, there are apparently no allegations of sexual misconduct against Allen from any adult leading ladies either, although he was obviouly in a position directly comparable to that of Harvey Weinstein. He apparently did not exploit it.

Unfortunately, it all reflects shockingly badly on Mia Farrow; as does Soon-Yi's testimony about her, which is corroborated by her sibling Moses Farrow. Perhaps, then, it is best to stop here.

The Truth That Dare Not Speak Its Name

It was pretty routine to the Greeks. Pederastic "courtship."

The problem with "pedophilia" in the Catholic priesthood, such as it is, has nothing to do with celibacy.

What nobody dares say is that it has a lot to do with homosexuality.

It is mostly a matter of gay priests "grooming" younger sexual partners.

It is quite natural for homosexuals, despite all the denials, to latch on like a limpet to young teenage boys. Since their sexuality has not yet been fully fixed and confirmed by experience, they are more lilekly to be open to homoesxual acts. Moreover, in case of any resistance, they are weaker. And less credible to the authorities.

It must, after all, be difficult for homosexuals to find sexual partners. Ninety-eight percent of those they are attracted to, and might approach, are going to be repelled by the idea, and may even react violently. Not good for your ego, at best.

Younger boys are the perfect solution.

Oscar Wilde with young Lord Alfred Douglas.

It also seems quite likely, given this dynamic, that nobody is born homosexual. They are turned homosexual by older homosexuals if they are gotten to at this early, impressionable age.

Early sexual experiences are likely to leave a deep impression.

Sadly, this means that a lot of gays have probably become priests out of no religious feeling, but as a useful way to meet and gain the confidence of such young men.

As many become teachers, or coaches.

Exit question: have you ever noticed that homosexual men are generally unusually good looking? Conversely, that unusually good looking men are more likely to be homosexual?

It makes sense: an older homosexual is going to approach the pretty boys first. The girls who come later get the leftovers.

There's Just a Lot of This Going Around

But if it's women doing it, and it is in the public and not the Catholic schools, you rarely hear about it.

Orwell, Schools, and Child Abuse

St. Cyprian's Preparatory School

 

Everyone says they are against child abuse. I guess they believe it. But most people seem to have no idea what it is. And what they do is moistly destructive. They think child abuse means either physical punishment or sexual contact. These are both red herrings. Busy fiercely punishing irrelevancies, they enable real child abuse to continue unrestricted.

Before we go any further, do not misunderstand. Sexual contact with children is always morally wrong. All sex outside marriage is morally wrong. But it is not, by itself, child abuse.

For what child abuse really is, I refer you all to George Orwell’s posthumously published essay “Such, Such Were the Joys.”

George Orwell was a macho guy. He volunteered for the losing side in the Spanish Civil War. In his books, he took on the Stalinists and the Marxist left, no doubt causing him some problems with his many leftist friends. He is a great writer largely because he stares evil in its face and calls it by its name.

The constitution of Animal Farm. Postmodernism in a sentence.

Yet he did not allow this essay, about his days in a British prep school, to be published until after his death. I presume the trauma was too great. The horrors of Animal Farm and 1984 were only echoes of St. Cyprian.

Here is Orwell’s short description of what child abuse is and what it feels like, although he does not call it by that name. He writes of

“a deeper grief which is peculiar to childhood and not easy to convey: a sense of desolate loneliness and helplessness, of being locked up not only in a hostile world but in a world of good and evil where the rules were such that it was actually not possible for me to keep them.”

This is also a perfect description of depression, and for good reason: as even the psychological professionals are beginning to accept, abuse is the cause of depression. For all we know, it may also be the cause of bipolar disorder (manic depression), schizophrenia, and more.

One abuses a child when one gives him or her no option of being good; when one teaches the child, implicitly or explicitly, that they are evil in their essential nature, and there is nothing they can do about it. A lot of parents do this, and a lot of schools do this.

One can abuse an adult in the same way, and in the same way produce depression. But it is far easier to do, and far more lasting in its effects, with a child.

Physical punishment is entirely neutral in this regard, so long as this double bind is not part of the experience. An absence of physical punishment is no improvement at all, for a child, so long as this double bind is still there.

Sexual contact is also neutral. It leads to this double bind if and only if the child gets the message that they are evil for having engaged in the activity, yet they cannot avoid it. No doubt many sexual predators deliberately impress this belief on their victims, in order to avoid detection. But it is a separate matter. I have known many, perhaps you have too, who were “sexually abused,” i.e., played with sexually by adults, as minors and have no scars to show for it.

The reality of abuse should not be difficult to understand; the matter seems pretty straightforward. In fact, the same understanding of abuse is portrayed again and again in fairy tales: Cinderella, Snow White, Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, and so on. It seems almost a standard feature. Indeed, one important purpose of fairy tales is surely to alert abused children that they are indeed abused, and that it is not their fault—they could be like Cinderella or Snow White or the Ugly Duckling. I imagine such tales have saved countless children from lives of emotional anguish.

So what is the modern response? The professionals are eager to point out themselves that fairy tales commonly portray child abuse. And what is their response? They want to suppress them.

Cinderella

It is hard to believe that the professionals are not trying actively to enable and assist child abuse. They seem, firstly, to deliberately misrepresent its nature, as either physical punishment or sexual contact; yet they themselves are quite capable of recognizing that Cinderella or Snow White are being abused, with no sexual contact nor physical punishment. Then they want to conceal the crime from its victims, and to deny them any help.