Zank Heaven...

Yestreen we broached the subject of current prejudices. Unfortunately, I am not yet bored with the subject. Today, we speak of "pedophiles," and the growing scandal of "child brides."

This too is common in the Philippines. A near neighbour to this seaside resort reportedly recently ran off with a fourteen-year-old. The local expat community is scandalized, of course. The man's a child molester, a "sexual predator."

Another beautiful propaganda coinage from the Ministry of Truth--a "predator" is a meat-eating animal. We are all predators, or else none of us are; the word almost literally reduces the target to the sub-human, brute beast level.

I would object, certainly, to an old man having sex with a young girl to whom he was not married. As to an old woman.

But this cartoon character released into what should be real life, the "pedophile," is really one more prejudice against men--since woman, though they are statistically more likely to sexually abuse children or adolescents, somehow generally escape the label and the punishment. Refer to the picture in your mind's eye when you hear the word "pedophile." Be honest, now: is the drooling, grinning character you see a man or a woman? Is he or she good looking?

You have been conditioned, just as a dog by Pavlov.

Let me explain "pedophilia." Muhammed, the Prophet, married his last and favourite wife, Ayesha, when he was in his fifties and she was as young as nine. Official Muslim sources. For one thousand four hundred years, this union has been held up as a moral and romantic ideal throughout the Muslim world. Many parents name their daughters "Ayesha" to evoke the memory. If this is wrong, and obviously wrong, isn't it odd that it never occurred to anybody until just the last few years?

And not just Islam, either. "Child brides" are all the scandal these days in Hindu India--all of a sudden. Worked okay and to everyone's satisfaction for five thousand years or more. Has right and wrong really suddenly changed over the last twenty years or so?

Read your Bible for more. Song of Solomon:

"We have a young sister,
and her breasts are not yet grown.
What shall we do for our sister
for the day that she is spoken for?"

Wedding preps in full swing. Puberty? Not yet.

For a millennium or two, it was understood that Joseph of Nazareth wed Mary the mother of Jesus when she was barely pubescent, perhaps twelve or thirteen, and he was an old man with a grey beard and grey hair--look at some of the old mosaics. This was the ideal family, the model for all mankind--just as were Ayesha and Muhammed. Nobody thought there was anything amiss there until quite recently. A lot of Joseph's statues have probably had their beards repainted accordingly.

"Joseph was an old man, an old man was he
When he married Mary, the Queen of Galilee..."

St. Joseph as he appeared in 1635. He has since aged remarkably well.

The prejudice is recent enough that the laws in North America have just barely caught up. No surprise--over the last forty years or so our ideas of sexual morality have changed so fast any thinking person has to know something is wrong. Over that period, homosexual sex, adultery and abortion, for example, have all gone from a criminal offense to a "human right." May-December marriage has moved at about the same speed in the opposite direction. Even a generation ago, it was fairly common for girls to marry in the US South in their early teens. I was just reviewing the biography of Edgar Allan Poe: he married his cousin Virginia when she was thirteen. But never mind Poe; Elvis and Priscilla Presley started dating when she was fourteen. You can even trace the development in the history of the cinema--up to the fifties the standard was still to have a much older man playing as male lead to a much younger woman--fifty and twenty, if not fifty and fifteen. Bogart and Bacall. Gable and Leigh. Gable and Monroe. Cooper and Kelly. Stewart and Kelly. Nobody thought it was immoral--just classically romantic.

Mrs. Virginia Poe, 13.

All very much to the advantage of the woman in particular, by the way. Older men have more money to support a family; but women are, by contrast, perfectly ready to have children at a much younger age. No reason for them to wait, to leave their lives on hold, even if men must. Younger women are also much less likely statistically to die in childbirth with a first child--and the first child is the most risky. This is important in poor places where good medical care is not readily available--and in earlier times when it was available nowhere.
Times have changed, in that it is now at least safe to leave childbearing until later. Why woman would want to remains a question. Only in the modern West, after all, has adolescence become such a notorious time of angst and recklessness; surely this is symptomatic of a system that has left so many young people all dressed up for real life, but with nowhere to go. Women in the Third World, interestingly, report being much happier than the men; in the modern West, that gap has closed.

But even so, times have not changed everywhere. In only somewhat poorer countries, the old equation still applies. In India, surely. In the Philippines, good medical care is still beyond the reach of most, and women marrying in their early teen years is still quite common. All Filipina women also seem to prefer significantly older men. So, I discovered last summer, do Bulgarian women.
I expect the same is still true for the great majority of the world's people. For Western feminists to try to impose their "morality" here, is probably to condemn a great many Third World women to death, and their children to neglect or starvation.

Quite possibly, they don't care.

Obviously, at best, a cultural prejudice is involved, so long as this "pedophilia" includes marrying the "victim." Yet call someone a "pedophile," or a "sexual predator," and Ann Landers feels perfectly morally justified to suggest sweetly in her column that they really all ought to be castrated. They can't ever,obviously, be trusted anywhere around children, ever, again. Statutes of limitations must be suspended indefinitely. Their names and home addresses must be kept public and their whereabouts always known for the rest of their natural lives, ensuring that they can never rehabilitate, never rejoin society, never stop paying for their crime, and are ready targets for anyone else wishing to act out their own righteousness against them. Send to prison, they are shockingly often put to death there by other inmates--almost necessarily with some level of connivance from the prison authorities.

Absolutely no humanity left. And clearly, no human rights left.


I recall telling a fellow grad school student that one of my favourite writers was Lewis Carroll.

"How could you?" he asked, shocked. "That pedophile!"

Never mind that Carroll was not, as far as we know, a "pedophile."

Never mind that.

My colleague's favourite author was Ezra Pound.