Nonce Sense

Lots of fuss about Chris Langham, after his conviction for 'creating' kiddy porn, although he got off the charges of actually having under-age sex. As one is obliged to do these days, I must first state my position on this. As Mr Langham once apparently said, I like children, although I couldn't eat a whole one. Actually that's not true. I don't really like children. They're nasty, smelly, annoying creatures who seem to do little except demand things and put sticky wrappers into your hand when you're not expecting it. I have one of my own. I know.

In other words, I'm not a paedophile, and I don't really understand people who are. I would no more want to have sex with a child than I would want to screw my car. This may come as a shock to the powers that be who believe that all men are latent peadophile rapists, just waiting for their perverted lusts to be triggered by a picture, but that's the way it is. I'm just not interested in children.

However, I was swimming this morning at my local pool when my eye chanced on an attractively pneumatic black woman frolicking in the water. Mmm, nice, thought my lizard brain. Not that I would have done anything about it, being happily married and a geek, but any man who says he doesn't look is a liar. Then her mum got into the pool and I realised that she was about 14. I was discreetly leching at an under-age girl. That makes me a paedophile, surely?

Well, not in Spain or Japan, and possibly not in Germany, or a host of other places.

It seems to me that whatever the legal age of consent is, someone who wishes to have sex with someone else who is pre-pubescent has something wrong with their brain. From an evolutionary perpective I can't think of any way in which this would be a useful adaptation*. They're just broken.

This is completely different from someone who wishes to have sex with someone else who is post-pubescent, but below the legal age of consent in their particular locality. That's entirely normal behaviour. Healthy young women are the ideal mate, from an evolutionary perspective. They are strong, fit and fertile. Society recognises this by encouraging females to try and look younger to get a partner. Boob jobs, cosmetics, hair dye are all ways to appear younger, and appeal to a male brain evolved to look for reproductive fitness, i.e. youth.

However, in the eyes of the law, they are just the same. This seems silly to me. I appreciate that we have to infantilise our teenagers in order to educate them sufficiently to be members of our complex western society. And I've blogged about Rousseau and the noble savage before. Even so, lumping people who are normal, but have transgressed their society's taboos in with people with broken brains seems wrong. The former need a slap on the wrist, the latter need treatment.

Fixed age of consent laws will always throw up anomalous cases, but it's generally for the best that schoolgirls get on with their homework without having to fend off men trying to get into their pants, so generally I support them. However, lumping everyone into the category of sick perverted paedophiles just isn't helpful. As with everything else in life, the reality is more nuanced.

* just because I can't think of it doesn't make it true, of course, but until I read otherwise, I'm sticking to it.

** the title comes from the fantastic Brass Eye 'Paedogedden' special.

UPDATE: someone on the cif thread pointed me here, with the statistic that 25% of adult males fancy children. That seems a bit high to me, and I suspect that what happens in the lab doesn't transfer into the real world in this case.

Which Tarot Card Am I?

I like the Tarot, and can do passable readings. This may sound odd, considering I'm a thorough-going rational materialist, but I find the images fascinating, and in a Jungian sense I think they are visual representations of Archetypes. Anyway, I couldn't resist the chance to see what card I was:

You are The Hermit

Prudence, Caution, Deliberation.

The Hermit points to all things hidden, such as knowledge and inspiration,hidden enemies. The illumination is from within, and retirement from participation in current events.

The Hermit is a card of introspection, analysis and, well, virginity. You do not desire to socialize; the card indicates, instead, a desire for peace and solitude. You prefer to take the time to think, organize, ruminate, take stock. There may be feelings of frustration and discontent but these feelings eventually lead to enlightenment, illumination, clarity.

The Hermit represents a wise, inspirational person, friend, teacher, therapist. This a person who can shine a light on things that were previously mysterious and confusing.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

H/T to DK. I think I shall just crawl back into my cave now.

The Noble Savage

The doctrine of the Noble Savage was first popularised in Rousseau's Emile (1762), . It's the idea that in our natural state, unsullied by technology, people were peaceful hunter-gatherers, with a deep respect for nature and all living things, living in harmony with our environment. Children, too, are naturally good, kind and innocent, until corrupted by their contact with the adult world.

In my opinion it is arrant nonsense and the cause of many of societies current ills :- Green Fundamentalism, Anti-intellectualism, and the Paedophile Panic, to name a few. It's the mirror image of the doctrine of Original Sin, which is just as silly.

In Edge magazine, Steven Pinker dismantles one of the planks upon which the idea of the Noble Savage rests upon; the idea that society is more violent today than in the past. Despite all the wars and genocides* of the last century, he makes the point that if modern society was as violent as historical society, our death toll in the 20th century would have been 2 billion rather than the comparatively meagre 100 million we actually killed.

He isn't sure exactly why we've got so much nicer and less violent, although he lists a few possibilities. One possibility he doesn't list explicitly is the possibility that is is the fact that we are getting more prosperous as time goes on. It does seem that rich people are actually nicer to each other, presumably because they don't need to squabble over scarce resources, and aren't so anxious and aggressive because they're less scared of dying.

* I hate the way genocide has been redefined to mean attempting to kill people of an ethnic group, rather than actually annihilating a particular ethic group, (e.g. the Tasmanian aborigines). Likewise with decimate, which means to kill 1 in10, not to kill nearly everyone in a group.

655,000 dead. Who cares?

655,00 Iraqi's have died since the start of 'Iraqi Freedom', according to a study by The Lancet. President Bush has said that this is 'not credible'. Well he would say that, wouldn't he. However, this figure is also disputed by iraqbodycount.org who reckon the figure is more like 49,760. I'm using the high estimates here. The low estimates are 426,000 vs 44,803. Athænium has nice posts about it here and here.

I don't care. 655,000 people dead, and I don't care. You probably don't either. Oh, I care in an abstract, it's a bad thing that people die, sort of a way. But not in the deep emotional sense that I would feel if a friend or family member died. Not even in the stressed and saddened way I would react if a person was killed outside my house. It's just news.

This is summed up in a truly brilliant article which explains this, one of the hard problems of human relationships, and is also very funny.