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The new House Speaker, Mike Johnson, is an Evangelical Christian that has positions and stances on homosexuality that I do not share (I confess, I remain a Millennial lib that has no problem with gay people doing gay things). Nonetheless, this CNN video where they discuss his positions on homosexuality and conversion therapy just seems so bizarre to me. In it, they refer to the idea of someone going from gay to straight as "debunked", quote Johnson saying, "there's freedom to change if you want to", and "homosexual behavior is something you do, not who you are".
Despite my own inclination to completely accept gay people qua gay people, I find nothing objectionable about Johnson's statements and see them as a much more accurate model of reality than what the CNN crew is expressing. I have zero doubt that sexual preferences and predilections can be substantially altered through a combination of conditioning, cognitive therapy, and repetition. I'm agnostic on whether this could allow someone who has a natural inclination towards homosexuality (or heterosexuality) to groom attraction for the sex that they didn't initially prefer, but it's not obvious to me, and I don't think there's good reason to say that it's deboonked as though this is just a common stylized fact. Likewise, even if it proves impossible to change one's underlying preference, it certainly remains true that one can elect to follow a different pattern of behavior than their natural tendency. I might have a natural tendency to hook up with a flirtatious woman at the bar while I'm on a work trip, but Mrs. O'Dim wouldn't appreciate this and I value her so much more than some stupid hookup. Were I a religious man, I might be inclined to view my religious obligations through the same sort of lens.
But really, the thing that keeps hitting me with dissonance isn't even the above points, which I can at least countenance reasonable counterarguments to, but the incongruity with the belief that gender itself is a mere social construct that is fully malleable to an individual's stated preference. A man attracted to other men cannot become a straight man, but he can become a straight woman. Do the people articulating this view not notice that this is at least a difficult pair of propositions to adhere to? Do they see no conflict? Do they understand the conflict, but believe that it's a question that's been solved by The Science, so better to just trust The Science and move on? Cynically, I think it's mostly that expressing the opposite view will get you bullied and fired.
The thing is, we're expected to believe that conversion therapy works for paedophiles (or Minor Attracted Persons, if I'm getting on the new euphemisms bandwagons):
Here are people who don't choose their sexuality, whose inclinations are fixed, and who are treated by society with contempt, fear and loathing.
Here are sympathetic people in the psychiatry, psychology, and social sciences fields who want to help these pariahs, and part of that is appealing for our understanding and to put aside our reflexive reaction of "they're criminals and perverts, lock them up!"
So what can we do to help and support them not to offend? Well, lots of (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-022-02377-6) therapy, it seems.
I know I'm a cynic, but I fully expect MAPs to go the same way as homosexuality: a lot of political influence behind the scenes to get it re-classified as 'not a mental disorder', then the PR push about "See? Experts say it's not perversion! Trust the Science!" and eventually therapy to 'help stop the MAP from acting out his attraction to those below the legal age of consent' will be considered every bit as much offensive, and we'll get the same pop culture stories of "they put a hot wire to my head/because the things I did and said/they made these feelings go away/model citizen in every way".
Give it twenty years to get across, child-fucking is a harder row to hoe than two guys wanting to fuck each other. But it'll go that way, they're already putting in the spade work about "no it's got nothing to do with child abuse" that happened with legalising and normalising homosexuality. It will undergo the same "trying to change someone's innate sexual orientation to one deemed acceptable by society is abusive" shift.
And before anyone jumps in with "but being gay is perfectly fine and normal, it's not the same thing at all!", weren't we told that 10% of the population was LGBT so this means it's normal and natural? Well, same goes for being MAP!
5% is more than transgender at the moment. As we were reminded constantly during the gay rights campaigns: someone you know, someone you work with, someone in your family, is gay and you don't know it. Aren't you willing to be compassionate and loving? Love trumps hate! Change that to "MAP and you don't know it" and run the same campaigns, and I'm sure there will be "but being MAP is perfectly fine and normal, it's got nothing to do with child sex abuse" talking points put out there as well.
Now that was an unexpected Public Image Limited reference. May the road rise with you, FarNearEverywhere. And remeber: "Anger isn't energy." Or "Anger is an energy." Hard to tell given Rotten's elocution...
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You seem to kind of have three points shoved in there, let me see if I can get at them:
Answer: 'works' means very different things in these two cases.
The claim for therapy 'working' on gay people is that they become normal straight people with happy heterosexual sex lives and etc after the end of some treatment program instead of just having happy consensual gay relationships.
The claim for therapy 'working' on pedos is that they'll be able to live a sad and unfulfilled life of permanent chastity with enough willpower and constant oversight instead of repeatedly raping people.
These are not really the same definitions of 'working'. It's easy to imagine that you could convince some number of gay people to live sad lives of chastity with enough constant and unending oversight and social pressure (see: clergy). 'Conversion therapy' is making a much stronger claim with much less support.
Answer: we've been hearing that for generations now and it's never happened. Literally gay people are adults working at offices now who were born before people started using that rhetoric and they've grown up their whole lies rolling their eyes at it because it never happens.
Yeah there are some weirdos on the internet pushing for it, there was NAMBLA in the 80s, there's always been weirdos pushing this agenda from the fringes of society. It's a lot less accepted now than it used to be, Romeo and Juliet were 13, Stray Cat Blues was a hit in the 60s, etc.
What's always missing from this formulation of how your opponents view the world is the concept of victims. You have an analogy based entirely on sexual liberation, without any of the other context.
Which is crazy because tomorrow it will be talk of how actually the progs are total prudes who hate sex because of #MeToo and 'enthusiastic consent' and the like making modern sex and dating an impossible minefield. Progs are obsessed with sexual victimization and finding and protecting and creating through rhetoric victims of sexual abuse, but you completely overlook that when trying to blood libel other sexual minorities by talking about how the progs are totally going to love pedos and make them the next big thing.
This is, charitably, extremely silly.
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Your first link is broken.
I don't agree with your prediction. The trend over the last 50 years or so has been an increase in opposition to sexual relationships between children and adults. The age of consent has been going up. The penalties for sexually abusing minors have been increasing. The general concern over paedophilia has been increasing. Age gaps are becoming taboo. The gap in general expected behaviour between adults and children has been increasing while the age at which people are considered to be full adults is getting later and later.
The standard definition of a mental disorder is based on whether the behaviour causes harm. I don't see how paedophilia would not be considered a mental disorder in a society that considers sexual activity between a child and a much older person causes immense psychological harm.
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Well we can look at the facts, which are that since the 1980s gay rights have become widely accepted, gay marriage legalized across the West; homophobia seriously reduced, and yet at the same time ages of consent have risen (substantially in parts of Canada and Europe), punishments for abuse of children have hugely increased, many more people are in jail for these crimes, and - perhaps most significantly - it’s much less socially acceptable for a 25 or 30 year old man to have a 15/16 year old girlfriend in 2023 than it was in 1973 or 1993. That’s a good thing (in my opinion), but it suggests that things are moving further against the direction you suggest is likely.
The French tried that in the 70s; it didn't work great for 'em. (Some) Westerners have been there, done that, got the T-shirt.
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Ages of consent may have risen, but we're much more accepting of sexual activity at younger ages. Think of "Romeo and Juliet" laws, or the constant tub-thumping over "we must teach sex education at [age whatever] because by age [a couple years more] they're going to be experimenting with sex". That used to be "by sixteen", now it seems to be trending down to "by twelve".
While repugnance around thirty year old man has sex with six year old child will persist, I'm not so sure that "thirty year old man has sex with sixteen year old" will. After all, if some are pushing to reduce the voting age to sixteen, and we accept that a sixteen year old can have a twenty year old boyfriend, then that means we think 'legal minor' may indeed be mature enough to decide such things.
I'm not saying it'll be easy or fast, but I do think there will be a swing back, as with many things, so that the rise in age and the reset of it that you mention may be seen as an over-reaction, and we must correct in the opposite direction, so if Judy is seventeen and eight months of age, why shouldn't she legally be able to have a relationship with thirty year old Tom, what magic happens with waiting just another four months for her to be legally adult at eighteen?
Laws distinguishing between young people having sex with each other vs with older ones seem to be rather supporting that increasing acceptance of sexual practices does not imply increased acceptance of paedophiles?
Are they capable of consenting to having sex with one another?
...because right now, 'consent' is the only tool in the toolbox of the Moral Police.
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Sex education works at reducing teenage sex and pregnancies, as advertised, by emphasizing the consequences of having sex. If you wanted to encourage teenage sex you wouldn't tell them anything and let nature take its course.
This is ironic because your second scenario is legal in most of the world, including most of the US and has always been so and in the places where it isn't it's because of feminist campaigning.
The progressive movement that exists today is overwhelmingly sex negative: they are in favor of raising the age of consent (to 25), against age gaps, against workplace relationships, against flirting in public, or in bars, or everywhere except designated dating apps, against prostitution, against pornography (except onlyfans), against sex comedies, against sexy women in video games, against revealing clothing in movies.
Play some of the wokesploitation games (Dream Daddy, Goodbye Volcano High), for example: everyone is some kind of queer but no sex, not even hinted at, maybe a (one) kiss, maybe the farthest they get is holding hands.
The trans kids stuff is the second most successful mass sterilization project in the world. Puberty blockers likely cause permanent inability to orgasm, what has your church done that's as effective as that at preventing teenage sex?
It may be legal, but as you point out, there is campaigning to make it repugnant. That's what I mean by the swinging of the pendulum; from 'sure a thirty year age gap between marriage partners is okay, even if it's unusual' to 'he took advantage of that poor twenty-five year old young woman' to, in future, back again to 'yeah she's sixteen and he's forty but hey if she's mature enough to make up her own mind, who are you to say it's wrong?'
The irony there being that the extremes of liberalisation have done more than the most conservative attitudes, indeed.
So your evidence for the pendulum swinging in direction X is evidence that it is going in the opposite direction?
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I don’t think that pendulum will swing, because it’s not tenable to get there. Very young women(such as teenagers) being able to have serious relationships, especially relationships with older males, with a rate of it all ending in tragedy that society considers acceptable depends on the power that the parents of very young women exercise over them both formally and informally.
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Ironically, some queer people do complain about this trend of "sexuality without sex," I believe.
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The progressive movement that exists today can be summarized as "Straight male sexuality bad, everything else good!". They are in favor of raising the age of consent, but deny that women actually need to get consent from men. They are against age gaps, but deny behavior of older women toward younger men is sexual. They are against men flirting with women unless the women desire it, but think women should be free to flirt with men whenever they wish. They are against any media that panders to the sexual desires of straight men, but are okay with media that panders to the sexual desires of others.
"Sex positivity" has always been tied up in Feminism and thus has always only cared about ensuring sexual outcomes are positive for women.
Sex postive feminists existed at one point, it's just that after they lost the feminist sex wars, the sex negs flayed them and wore their skin to hide their puritanical, hypocritical nature.
Sex positive feminists won the feminist sex wars though. Sex positive feminists were never supportive of male sexuality except so far as it could be exploited by women.
No, that's what "they" say. My conspiracy theory is that the sex positive feminists actually lost. Modern feminists do not like porn and prostitution. They are very fond of sex negative terms like rape culture and objectification.
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I'd say they were mugged by reality, and not-quite-realized but painfully found out that the wall isn't there to keep them in.
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It's almost like the church wasn't aiming for mass sterilization.
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PS. I'm glad that the religious right is making a comeback because maybe they can succeed in making sex negativity uncool again.
"The comeback of the religious right" is a lot more wishful thinking by disaffected liberals poking the pendulum with a stick asking it to make a swing back, than it is something happening in real life. Sorry, but the 90's aren't coming back anytime soon, they were the point when the rubber band was about to break, not a stable equilibrium.
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Anecdotally, I think this would track with my experience? Some time ago I knew a trans person in her thirties who was enthusiastically seeking to date a seventeen year old, and fully intended to have sex with them at the first opportunity. I expressed concerns and did not get that far.
We are in a period of category collapse, it seems to me, and the elevation of individual will and preference, with consent and harm as the sole acceptable guardrails. It's hard to see how that doesn't lead to some pretty disastrous outcomes.
Seventeen isn't quite a minor (legally maybe) and thirty isn't that old, but yeah. Not a good augury. The types who chase seventeen year olds will be doing that when they're thirty, and forty, and fifty, and...
Leonardo DiCaprio is getting a lot of stick on that front. Now, it's understandable that "men like young women" and "why is this young woman dating this twenty years older than her rich, famous guy, who can know the answer to that?" but after a certain point, it goes from "uncomfortable" to "downright creepy".
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What is category collapse? What are some examples of disastrous outcomes you foresee?
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We've become much more accepting of extramarital sex, but I don't think there has been much change in the acceptability of having sex at a young age, other than indirectly in that teenagers are usually not married. But it used to be common for teenagers to be married. Romeo and Juliet were 16 and 13.
The trend has actually been away from there being legal minors. The age of consent was traditionally around puberty while the age of majority was originally 21. So there used to a huge gap between reaching an age where you could have sex or marry and when you became a full adult with full rights. This gap is now completely gone in some jurisdictions and where it remains, it has been shrinking.
Romeo and Juliet was also a cautionary tale. They’re portrayed as idiots who create an entirely preventable tragedy by not listening to their elders who think they’re young, impulsive, and need to be restrained, and the ongoing feud between the two families prevents them from intervening effectively. It’s a plot point that Juliet’s father rejects a marriage proposal from an ally of the family on the basis of age and Romeo is portrayed as a young, ignorant hothead.
Romeo and Juliet is an Object Lesson in the importance of a functioning postal system.
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Maybe in theory, but not really in practice. Average age of virginity loss is rising, not falling- this is also a reaction to "oh no, every kid has seen porn by 12" (and more recently, "kids have to know they're trans before they hit puberty or Bad Things will happen, so we should be trying to force the issue at 6-8"). [Also, there is very little "experimenting with sex" today anyway; the state of modern gender relations combined with easier alternatives to sex for young men has seen to that.]
Well, brain chemistry says she's not a
human beingadult until 25, so she deserves the rules we give her. (That is what The Science says- it's not like we've ever used brain size comparisons to oppress other kinds of people in living memory or anything like that.)Gender and sexual politics follows (and slightly lags) economic conditions. Traditionalist-conservatives should fear an improvement in economic conditions as much as progressives do, because with better times comes more demand for sex that is usually met by relaxing the conditions around it (which tend to push the average age of first sex down).
As times get worse, we should expect more desperate flail by the faction that still needs to wear the concept of sex-positivity as a skinsuit- so while you'll probably see more examples of successful predation because of that flail (almost always male -> male), it's not going to meaningfully improve access to straight sex for men (or boys).
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