My Lonesome Cowboy

Odd that you guys would call this child pornography and/or be offended by it. Child pornography is not illegal because it is offensive, obscene, or “gross”. It’s illegal because it requires the exploitation of children in order to be produced and creating a demand for it would encourage people to abuse children by forcing them into participating. This statue obviously involved (as far as anyone can tell) no actual children. There is therefore no reason whatsoever for it to be considered in the same class as child pornography, and no reason for it to be illegal.

The idea of child sexuality was not even a particularly controversial one before the mid-1990s. Roseanne Barr is the primary source of everything we think today about child sexuality. Before her, everyone knew children had a primitive sexual side limited to raw sensuality. They saw relations between adults and children as potentially abusive because of the power differential, but accepted that if it WASNT a product of coercion, that the idea of psychological harm from any sexual activity was ludicrous. People going insane from rubbing bodies together? It just doesn’t make any sense.

But then Roseanne, one of the most well-known celebrities around at the time, came out with her story of long-repressed childhood rape. Make no mistake, it was rape for certain. But her argument was that since children are too stupid to be able to consent, that even if the child believed they wanted it to happen, it was still rape, and every single problem they ever encountered for the rest of their life could be blamed on those experiences. Alcoholic at 45? Blame your cousin you gave a blowjob to when you were 8 and he was 12. Wreck your car at 60? Blame your aunts best friend who laid you at 13. Etc.

She, and other commentators in the media who were obsessed with child sexuality as a moral issue, started around this idea that “children are not sexual creatures.” It is a ludicrous idea. We have VIDEOS of fetuses masturbating in the womb. Every mother of a boy knows that they get boners from birth. Every parent has seen their little girl rubbing her vagina and clitoris. Now, when parents see it happen, they leap on their children and take them to therapists, insisting they must have been molested. That is how completely they accepted this harmful “children are not sexual creatures” idea.

You guys betray having accepted that falsehood yourselves, believing that a statue of a boy masturbating to be offensive or whatever. Boys masturbate, it’s what they DO. In addition, it’s one of the most healthy activities a person can engage in. To do anything short of wholeheartedly encouraging kids to masturbate is to show a desire not just to ignore, but to harm their sexuality. Parents see the imaginary “pedophile menace” (look at the stats, pedophilia is very rare, and ephebophilia is not the same thing, look it up) as competition. They believe they should have complete control over their child as if it were property and not a human being. They believe that, as men “owned” the sexuality of their children in the past and sold their daughters for dowrys and the like, that today they have the right to castrate their children. Being raised in such a harmful and neglected manner, it is not surprising they grow up unable to even consider the issues surrounding the sexuality of youth and what should be done about a statue like this or “virtual” kiddie porn that they keep trying to make illegal (and failing… you really can’t make imaginary stuff illegal, but people are in prison for violating those laws anyway because they couldn’t afford to challenge the law that eventually was struck down).