On prejudice

One particular group of people that are often targeted by prejudice and discrimination are those we commonly refer to as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, intersex, and the newest category, “questioning”. Essentially it could be said that non-exclusively-heterosexual people are often discriminated against. Well, they’re not the only ones and any “minority” group within a society is prone to the effects of prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination. One thing I have found extremely interesting in the past few weeks, though, is the prejudice towards bisexual persons on behalf of exclusively homosexual persons.

I know, I know, in our personal non-politically-correctedness-contaminated dialogues we would call all people who aren’t exclusively heterosexual, gay. Whatever. Let’s not get into the semantics of these labels. However, do let me get back to the prejudice towards “bisexual” people I’ve noted in the past few weeks.

I remember an episode of ‘The L Word’ where one of the girls who was exclusively homosexual was deriding another female who was bisexual. The argument was something like ‘just make up your mind already’, ‘just decide’. Seriously? Sexuality is a choice now? I found that ironic given the common arguments homosexual persons raise in counter to the religious heterosexual calls to “be normal”.

What’s even more ironic is that a group of people who are passionate to defend from discrimination and claim their rights as the same to any other member of society can also be so equally discriminating of another group of society who face many if not all their same challenges. For example, as I pointed out above, one of the stereotypes often peddled about bisexual people is that they are ‘undecided’ in terms of their sexual preference/identity. The majority of proponents of these and many stereotypes about bisexual people are people who are exclusively homosexual. In reality, both these subsets of people form a larger group of people most commonly banded together as ‘gays’. The banding together is in fact a blessing to these same people, forming greater majorities in the fight for the things that are often fought for: freedom of speech, representation, and other basic human rights. However, once you take away the common struggle, us human beings prefer to struggle against each other, smaller minority groups, the next person lower in the rank, the poorer, the more unfortunate, the weaker in the pecking order.

Just as an educational exercise I’d like to relate some of the other prejudices I hear banded around about bisexual persons:

-They’re not really gay, they’re just promiscuous and would have sex with anyone who was willing.
-They not really gay, they’re just with a homosexual partner at the moment until they find what they really want: a heterosexual partner.
-Bisexual people are promiscuous, they have no loyalty, and they’ll always leave you for the next best thing.
-They’ll always leave you for an opposite gender person.
-They’re just experimenting; they’ll go back to being heterosexual eventually.
-They only care about sex.
-They can’t commit because they can’t even “commit” to either being gay or straight.
-They’re actually just straight people.
-They have to like either men or women MORE.... this more often comes up in the form of a question.
-They just haven’t decided (or figured out) yet whether they’re gay or straight.... They NEED to make this DECISION!
-They’re bad people who only want sex from you.
-They’re just plain bad people...

Sound familiar? Wherever a group of people congregate, smaller cliques of people will form. Why? It’s human nature. It’s part of the process of self-identity. Often we define things for what they’re not. We define ourselves similarly by what we’re not. We’re not like that other group of people, those bad people. Our own societal group is better, it’s right, it’s better than all other alternatives. As we do this we define ourselves: we’re good people, we’re consistent people, we’re loyal people, we are good and worthy human beings. We overlook our flaws: the prejudice, the discrimination, the often derogatory language we use towards the “other” groups. And yet, it is absolutely essential to form our own identity, to define ourselves, to believe we are good and just human beings. The important thing is that once we reach this level of identity we continue to challenge our perspective - to be truly open-minded!

...A quote:

"AIDS. Homosexual. Gay. Lesbian. You think these are names that tell you who a person sleeps with, but they don't tell you that. No. Like all labels they tell you one thing, and one thing only: Where does an individual so identified fit into the food chain, the pecking order? Not ideology or sexual taste, but something much simpler: clout. Not who I fuck or who fucks me, but who will come to the phone when I call, who owes me favors. This is what a label refers to. Now to someone who does not understand this, a homosexual is what I am because I have sex with men, but really this is wrong. A homosexual is somebody who, in 15 years of trying cannot get a pissant anit-discrimination bill through the city council. A homosexual is somebody who knows nobody and who nobody knows. Who has zero clout. Does this sound like me, Henry? I have sex with men. But unlike nearly every other man of whom this is true, I bring the guy I'm screwing to the White House and President Reagan smiles at us and shakes his hand."  -Roy Cohn in Angels in America, by Tony Kushner.

On love and fear

I'm heartbroken again this week so there's only one thing on my mind: porn... No, I mean love ! :)

...And the way that fear can really screw up lives. Below are a few stories that come to mind when I think about this topic. You may think of these as examples.

1.
The first story starts like this: This guy and girl fall in love. That happens the usual way it normally does, according to the same standard sequence: exposure, proximity, knowledge, understanding, affection, intimacy, and, eventually, love. Nothing new there. But there’s a key point in the ‘knowledge’ stage that the girl missed in the boy’s story: he can’t biologically father children, and what she wants more than anything in the world is to be a mother. But they’ve fallen in love, they love each other and love can conquer anything, right? Right? Wrong. Love sometimes can’t overcome fear. The guy starts freaking out about the girl constantly speaking about their future, their children, their life together as a family, etc. He sees the girl’s eyes beam with excitement and hope and expectation – expectations he can’t meet. So one day he tells her the part they skipped, that he can’t biologically father her children. Now, the girl having fallen absolutely in love with this guy, loving every part about him, loving him in the way only real love can be truly accepting, she tells him it doesn’t matter. Either they will find a way around his “problem” medically, they will adopt a child, or she will accept her life’s gift as loving that man she so whole-heartedly wants to share her life with. Happy endings seem in favour, right? Not once this horrible thing called fear sets in. The boy has his doubts. He loves this girl, he thinks he does, he would do almost anything for her, but he’s unsure about ending his singledom at such a young age. Of course, he doesn’t even understand this himself. He believes he truly loves her. He believes he is giving his all to this girl. He believes it will never work out. Eventually he tells this girl everything that is in his heart, everything except that truth he doesn’t even yet understand: he is scared of changing his life for a new one, even if that new life includes the person who loves him most in the universe. So when the boy tells the girl that he has to leave her, to end this once-great thing, he tells her that he loves her and that it is for that reason that he can’t be with her. Yes, fear does make us believe words like these are true. He tells her he wants her to be happy, to have her children like she previously planned, to have all she wants. He wants her happiness so much he is willing to sacrifice his own happiness in exchange for her fulfilling all her dreams. He doesn’t hear her say that it doesn’t matter, that the dream has changed, that he has now become an essential priority in her life without which the rest of it doesn’t make sense - with or without the children she (before meeting him) so badly wanted. He continues to tell her that it is LOVE that is forcing him make this decision, he tells himself this so often too that it feels like the truth. And that’s what fear can do to you; it’s like the devil disguising himself as an angel of light. It can make you believe that your actions are actually motivated by love and not that soul-sucking fear that ruins so many wonderful opportunities in this life.

2.
The second story is a little different. Here we have a woman of 27 years old. She is a girl who got used to always being the winner. She had the job she wanted, the apartment she wanted, the money she wanted, etc. She had everything except that thing she always wanted: to be loved by someone. Of course she didn’t like this because she wasn’t used to not having what she wanted and because life can be pretty lonely all by yourself. So one day she meets this guy who agrees to go out with her. They have a good time, he’s a nice person, and they share a lot of similar interests. She convinces herself that this guy is “the one” and so she does everything she can to secure him. She pleases him in every way he needs and wants. He doesn’t take advantage of her; no, he’s actually a nice guy, but she becomes too focused on convincing him that he must be the one that she starts scaring him away. Now, his fear isn’t so irrational because she’s quickly changing from the girl he was initially attracted to into this desperate girl he had no idea existed under that same skin. She starts smothering him with affection, wanting constant attention, feeling rejected and lashing out against him when she doesn’t get it, and basically overwhelming him in her “love”. Eventually he, of course, gets so scared of what she’s become and will become later on that he leaves her. That’s not irrational, the fear that killed the love in this situation was not that. The girl’s fear of being alone, of continuing lonely, of dying alone and without anyone was what killed it. She let this fear overwhelm her so much that it caused her to destroy her chances at having the very same thing she desired most: love, unconditional and undying love.

3.
Did you ever read that story ‘Oranges are Not the Only Fruit’ by Jeannette Winterson? The third story is about this – and this book was based on a true story so let me orientate you a little if you haven’t read it yet. It’s about this girl, a nice little white girl with freckles who come from a small village in England and who has a father that is a preacher. The whole family is quite religious – no, actually, VERY religious. They go to meetings several times a week, they sing hymns together, and every family has the aim that the boys of the family will become ministers and all the girls will grow up to be missionaries. The rule book says they have to marry another person from their faith, and, of course, this is so ingrained into everyone at such a early age that everyone wants this too. Anyhow, the thing with this girl is she meets another girl at a church meeting but this other girl is a little more risqué. Naturally, she develops an attraction towards this girl because she’s everything the good little church girl isn’t: confident, self-assured, brave, and daring. The friendly attraction develops into a crush and, slowly, into love. And basically that’s the premise of the book: two devoutly Christian girls having a love for each other that the rulebook condemns. So initially the girls embrace the challenge, they believe love isn’t wrong despite gender or religious creed, they believe THEY can make it. And, of course, it isn’t easy because it’s a small rural town, it’s the 1970s or so, there’s the “God will punish me; I’m going to go hell for this” thing, there’s the “my family will hate me for it” thing, there’s the “this isn’t normal (aka common)” thing. But they give it a go, and things aren’t easy but the girls truly are in love -or at least one of them is- and it’s worth it! Now, let me return to that statement of ‘at least one of them is’. What I mean to say is that perhaps they were both truly in love or maybe the good-girl fell in love but the other didn’t or vice versa, the result either way is the same: they (or at least one of them) allowed themselves to be defeated by fear. The end of the story is that the two girls separate, the ‘bad-girl’ to a life with a man and a kid, etc. The other girl moves on because what else can you do? You either fight to defend your team, your unit, or there is nothing there worth fighting for. At one point one of the girls let her fear of rejection from her family or her religious affiliates or God or society overshadow this thing she once claimed to feel: love. Or maybe it was even her own fear of letting another being into her world, her own need for control and self-sufficiency that scared her into cowardice. Either way, again, fear has kept two perfectly deserving human beings from experiencing this great blessing from God that is love.

4.
The last story is a rather common one. Basically, this boy falls in love with this girl and the girl, because she is bored in her life, decides to go along with this ‘love story’. They start dating, sleeping together, hanging out for extendedly longer and longer periods of time, etc. Eventually he reaches the stage when he is sure he is in love with her so he tells her so. He says the first “I love you”. She doesn’t know yet that they’re more than just words, she doesn’t yet know what love in any form means at all, so she says it back to him too. He believes it! So they go on as if ‘in love’. Now, while the guy has gone on in his head planning his and this girl’s lives together, she hasn’t stopped living hers the way she was before. She is still sexually-involved with other acquaintances, she still uses drugs to numb the pain of her troubled childhood, she still plans to move away overseas (with or without the boy in question). Of course, he doesn’t know this. So eventually it all falls apart when the boy naturally finds out. It falls apart because the girl let it. This girl had never known a loyal love, never experienced real love from someone who wasn’t trying to just take advantage of her, and she hadn’t yet learnt to love herself. One thing she did know very well was fear, to run from that which seems frightful and with potential to leave you vulnerable and hurt, to have a back-up or escape plan to avoid this, to not allow yourself to not be in control in the situation. This thing her boyfriend spoke about, this “love”, required self-sacrifice not just survival. It required trust, which she had taken from her from a very early age. It required a little courage to just allow things to evolve, but she had a desperate need for control if she was to avoid her childhood repeating itself. Underneath it all she did one day hope that she would either learn to be purely self-reliant with no actual need for other human beings in her life, or that she would meet someone who wasn’t like all the people that had betrayed her trust in the past. But the possibility of both those things was scary and so she ran. The boy got over it – because, seriously, no-one ever really dies from heartbreak.

Why am I telling you these stories? Because I’m heartbroken.
Some people when they leave you will tell you that they will never love again. They tell you this as if it mattered. It doesn’t. As long as you’re alive, there’s always the possibility of falling in love again. And it doesn’t matter! Who you love only matters to the person you love and there’s no shame in loving again, the same way there is no honour in not loving again. There’s the possibility of anything in this world, why not love? It’s great!

Thanks for reading.

On "coming out"

One of my favourite quotes in the world is one by Gore Vidal that says “There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses, if not practices”. He also said, “Actually, there is no such thing as a homosexual person, any more than there is such a thing as a heterosexual person. The words are adjectives describing sexual acts, not people”. Okay, so some of this argument is about semantics, but it is also about labels.

If you know me, you would know that I have a hatred of labels— and so comes this ambivalence about the whole concept of “coming out”. I do understand that the whole movement started as a way to counter discrimination against certain people because of their sexual practices, to claim back the respect and human rights owed to every human being. I understand how it is empowering, especially to individuals who have been oppressed, to claim with pride the person they are and their right to be. I understand that identifying with a group, coming together for camaraderie, is a very human thing and it is often the only way to bring about societal change. I understand how it came about, what I don’t like, however, is the expectation that is now placed on many people to “come out”, to label oneself as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or ‘questioning’.

One reason I don’t like the concept of “coming out” is that I find it biased that a person who has sex with a same-sex individual has to tell people about it, yet there is no expectation that a person who only engages in heterosexual acts do so. There are things about the sexual practices of my friends, my family, acquaintances, celebrities, politicians, and many other people that I don’t know about – and quite frankly couldn’t care less about. How old where they when they first had intercourse? What is their favourite sexual position? Are they multi-orgasmic? Do they prefer shaven or hairy genitals on their partner? Do they use toys? These are extremely personal and intimate questions about a person’s sexuality and we rarely are even bothered to know these things about people, so why should we care to know other intimate things like whether they have sex with men, women, or both. Does it change anything? No, it shouldn’t, especially if they’re your friends or family. Seriously, who would like to know all the sexual details of their friends or family? Not me. So why does there need to be this expectation that if you have sex with someone of your same gender that you have to tell the whole world about it? Quite frankly I have friends who are probably virgins, others that may or may not have had same-sex intercourse before, but I just really don’t care to hear about their sexual exploits one way or another. Sexual expression is a very intimate thing, usually only between two people, and that’s the way I am happy for it to stay.

And the other reason I am passionately against declaring your sexual preference is because of my hatred of labels. See, because once you tell the world you’re “gay” or “bisexual” that is all the world tends to see. You in fact lose a lot of your identity and become just a label, often described by a multitude of stereotypes. You may have sex with same-sex persons, but it’s probably not all you do. Maybe you have a job you’re very good at, maybe you follow a certain spiritual belief system, maybe you play an instrument or have a large family; but the moment you label yourself, that to me is like the death of the rest of you. And imagine being known for and described in terms of the things you like to do sexually! We would meet a lot of people, some of them our friends and family members, that were known as masturbators, others dildo-lovers, others anal-lovers, etc. But this is what some of our friends do and yet we think of them as friends, not as “straight” friends or “dildo-loving” friends, just our friends. The things our friends do and enjoy sexually is a personal matter for them and they aren’t and shouldn’t be expected to tell everyone about it, to “come out” as a dildo-lover or anal-bead enthusiast... So to “coming out” as gay or bisexual or transsexual, I say no (unless you consciencelessly choose to label yourself for whatever reason, for whatever secondary gain). To me, labelling isn’t creating equality. Labelling, putting up a division between “us” and “them”, isn’t creating equality between “us” and “them”, it just perpetuates the myth that people who have sex with same-sex individuals are purely defined by the sexual things they do. For me, to say a person is gay is a denial of everything else they are – and they may just be the best human being I know.

On "becoming" beautiful

I recently bought a new camera and I’ve just been taking photos of all sorts of random things and people. One of the things most people will often say to me when I ask to take their photo, though, is “not now, I look horrible”... Now, to myself I think “but this is how these people have chosen to present themselves today, why would that be ‘horrible’?” As I was thinking this, it reminded me of something I noticed a while ago – and maybe it has something to do with self-identity or the human concept of “beauty”. At the same time, I don’t want to be a hypocrite, and I’ll admit I once thought like those people.

Beauty is a very difficult to define concept, of course. You could say a rose is beautiful and say a woman’s face is beautiful, and not mean that the woman’s face looks like a rose. Also, one man’s wife may be beautiful to him but another man who has just met her may think nothing of her. There’s subjectivity involved, history and knowledge of a thing’s other than physical attributes involved, circumstance, and relativity of one thing to another of its kind.

I’ve always liked to take photos of things – just for fun. When I was younger I started to notice how some of the best photos to take are of children. Not all children, but children who are young enough to recognize themselves in a mirror, but not so young as to be too easily distractible when they’re awake. And when I say “the best photos”, I mean those that are most close to reality, the one’s that replicate a moment in time a little closer to the truth. I took so many photos of one of my nieces at one stage because with this childhood innocence came this absolute sincerity that even a camera (in my unskilled hands) could capture. Now, this little girl was just being herself and making it so easy for me to capture that “self”, so I took so many photos because I knew that the day would come where she would ask me if she looked ‘good’ in a photo. In fact what happened was that she then went to school and was taught to smile whenever a camera was in front of her. Don’t get me wrong, she was still beautiful, her appearance evolving with age (as it never ceases to do during our lifespan), but she had lost that sincerity that once came so naturally to her – and all because someone taught her that an attractive – and so photo-worthy face – must have a smile on it. A smile can make any face beautiful, that’s true, but that was probably first said about sincere smiles.

Before this period, though, my niece went through a stage where she figured out that the thing looking back at her in the mirror was herself. She had learnt before that what the general concept of a human face was: two eyes, nose, two nostrils, ears, mouth, hair, and attached to the rest of a body with arms, legs, etc. We first learn by stereotype, it’s essential; the world is just too difficult to comprehend otherwise. The fun times were standing in front of the mirror, her and me, pointing at this little person in the mirror and she realising it was herself because she is standing next to a person that looks exactly like me. Then she would laugh for ages. Most children will do that. They don’t notice that their clothes are all stained from when they spilt food on themselves, that there is things in their hair that came from the grass in the backyard. All these things are inconsequential details, the reality is that there in the mirror are two human beings, one which is herself, and one someone other than herself. This is self-awareness.

To return to photos, though. What is the first thing you notice when you look back at old photos? Yourself! Inevitably that is what you notice, it’s probably instinctual. You disregard the surroundings and the other people in the photo, and it’s not vanity, it’s just constancy to recognize yourself as you once were (because all moments are always in the past). Everybody has a self-image, a physical image and also a cognitive one that would recognize your own style of reasoning or speaking, for example. So the next thing we do with photos is to compare the image in the photo with our internal self-image, but also to this other image about “beautiful” human beings we have been conditioned to believe. So, often the internal thought process goes “does this look like me? does it look like me at my best physical appearance? and, does it look like those models in magazines and film actors?” When we were children the thought process was, “what is it? is it human?” and “who is it?”. Things were much simpler then. So, I won’t go on about how this “beautiful human being” mental image came to be formed because most people can probably guess it already.

My niece grew up, and she still likes photos; she even knows how to pose now. The skill difference between professional models and the rest of us is that the pros know how to look natural in a completely staged environment. That “natural” look and certain biometric features that some scientists with lack of better things to study have found is what we usually define as beauty. But my niece is beautiful too. She is beautiful because she’s my little girl, because she is a child, because there’s this sincerity about her, and because I love her. I’ve said nothing of her appearance, but you get the concept of a beautiful child like the hundreds we’ve all seen before. She is confident in herself and of her appearance. She’ll always let you take her photo, as long as you know she will always smile on cue for you.

But now, as adults, a lot of the people I come across don’t want their photo taken because they don’t look “beautiful” enough. I didn’t want a photo of a “beautiful” person, if I did I’d have cut it out of a magazine; I wanted a photo of the person who I’m asking. Has this image of un-beauty been so deeply ingrained in us or is it a universal lack of self-esteem that makes us shy away?

You know what else I’ve noticed in the last few years also? That the people that make good photos to take of are, other than children, the elderly and indigenous people with little exposure to western society. People of poor countries also have a tendency to view a request from a friend for a photo as a gesture similar to asking for a glass of water: ‘gladly, my friend, if I have enough to give’. And why do they care less than the average person about their appearance? I think because they think of a photo just as that, a thing that eventually will just come to be on a piece of paper as a representation of an event in time. But what about the elderly? Well, then I started thinking that perhaps they have had more time to have also come to this same reasoning, but also to accept their own physical appearance and it’s changing nature.

I was twenty-six by the time I finally stopped feeling ashamed of my own body. My weight has fluctuated since I was young, and since about the age of 12 I was ashamed of it. I’ve always struggled with low self-esteem despite my family thinking that I was OK because I got good grades at school, inside there was this loathing of myself from the core to my very skin. I felt ashamed of my body, to be who I was and how I was, and the last thing I wanted was to look at myself and let alone let anyone else see me. Mirrors were extremely uncomfortable places for me to stand in front of. Having to have a photo taken was almost an offensive gesture made at me. I didn’t want to look at myself. Anyhow, the whole thing made my life not very interactive and lonesome when I was young, though with study commitments I gradually expanded the number of things I became comfortable doing.

When I was 26, in my final year of med school, I finally came to the realisation that this was it, that this was my body, that this is who Vanessa was and I would just have to accept it. I finally realised that the people who spoke to me, who befriended me, or who were otherwise associated with me had chosen to do so despite of what horribleness I thought I looked like. If others could interact with me so easily, accept me as I was, then why should I not? The realisation sounds so simple now, but it had taken me 26, almost 27, years to reach. After that, it made romantic relationships easier to conceive, both in my mind and physically. I felt more at ease with being my true self. And even though 26 (or since) was probably not my best year in terms of physical appearance, I finally also accepted the changing nature of my appearance. And guess what? I finally stopped caring about what I looked like in photos.

On homosexuality, the DSM, and Pedophilia...

When I was younger people used to tell me that homosexual people were bad, that they were defective, that they were evil. These people were well-meaning religious clerics, family, family friends, school teachers, and other respectable adults. I emphasize well-meaning because their attitudes were not what we now commonly refer to as homophobic, discriminatory, judgemental, ignorant, or bigoted. Their views reflected a common majority view. They weren’t bad people saying derogatory things about a minority group of people; they were just repeating what was common thought at the time. These were good people.

Now, the common view at the time –that homosexual persons were sexual deviants, less than healthy “normal” humans- was grounded in the scientific and medical descriptions accepted until very late in human history. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) classified homosexuality as a mental disorder until as late as 1973, as did the World Health Organisation in its International Classification of Diseases (ICD). Gradually in a period since the mid 1970s the classification of mental illness was ratified with increasing knowledge of prevalence and non-observance of the common disclaimer in these classification systems: “the symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning”. If a behaviour is sufficiently common and does not cause significant negative outcomes, then it is a tough call to call it a mental disorder.

Of course, the other thing that happened since the inception of the DSM and similar classification systems and the 1970s was the so-called “sexual revolution” of the 1960s. The sexual revolution abolished many taboos (or perhaps constraints) on sexual activity. One such taboo was that of sexual activity between members of the same (phenotypic) sex. As a result of the sexual revolution a lot of people came to experiment with all different forms of sexual expression, although most commonly this was frequent non-monogamous heterosexual intercourse. So one could pose the question, did this social breakdown of a variety of sexual taboos (at the time they called it something akin to generalised immorality or looseness) lead to the increased acceptance of the people who engage in homosexual activity just because homosexual interaction happened to be one of those taboos? Perhaps, but it most likely was also (at least in addition) due to the lack of findings of “dysfunction” from medical and scientific point of views.

Recently I attended a talk on psychopathology, or, actually, the classification of mental disorders. The question was posed: what is a mental disorder? Something that is inherently bad? Something bad because some scientists and medical doctors said so? Something that makes the affected person or ones associated to him or her feel bad? Something that makes the affected person unable to function effectively or satisfactorily in his micro- or macrocosm? A behaviour that is uncommon in a particular environment or situation? A behaviour politicians and lawmakers decided is bad? A behaviour that a large proportion of the person’s peers would judge unreasonable or bad? Now, regarding homosexuality and its transition in classification systems from “bad” to “normal”, we could answer this question in many of the dimensions posed above. But my point is not to argue “homosexuality: good or bad?” but rather to provide a backdrop to one scenario posed to me, which at first sight scared me deeply, so I want to finally address it and put it to rest.

Now, to speak of the scenario posed to me (and that use to plague me), I have to first emphasize I’m playing devil’s advocate here. As I mentioned before, I grew up being told that homosexuality is bad, homosexuals are deviants, abnormal, less than, etc. Gradually that story changed and homosexual persons became persons (foremost) who happened to engage in homosexual activity. What if it were possible that this happen to other behaviours currently considered "abnormal"; that they also went from being described by others as “bad” to now being described as “normal”? And this change could come about through change in social attitude or the discovery of a high prevalence of the condition. After all, if all the people of the town are crazy and the king is sane, then for being a sane minority the king will be considered crazy by the townsfolk. The scenario posed was about pedophilia.

The DSM-IV-TR classifies pedophilia as a paraphilia in which there are “over a period of at least 6 months, recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges or behaviours involving sexual activity with a pre-pubescent child or children; and the person is at least age 16 years and at least 5 years older than the child”. Of course, it includes the common DSM disclaimer, “the fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviours cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupation, or other important areas of functioning”. Now consider a world where pedophilia occurs in every culture and ethnic group, in members of different socioeconomic classes, includes members from across all professions and trades; a world where 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 7 boys are sexually interfered with by an adult; and a world where people have become too accustomed to saying “it’s OK because everyone does it”. This is exactly the world we live in! So is it purely OK, really “normal”, if prevalence rates are high enough? (I hope not.)

In a hypothetical new and vile world, imagine seeing children talking to each other in a playground. One asks, ‘so when did your daddy devirginize you’? The other answers, ‘I was six. Hurt like hell. Now we only do it in the shed every week when mum’s not home’. A third one says, ‘you’re lucky. My mum’s friend did me when I was four – and I can’t even remember the first time’. Cut ahead to a generation from that and cutting scars on human forearms have become the norm so much that you’d think this is how we were born, with multiple lacerations tracking from our wrists to our shoulders. There’s no taboo about it. The kids go out with daddy for their fishing and “playing” trips. Mum knows, dad is not ashamed, and the children all share their common carnal knowledge amongst themselves at school. The mental disorder classification books no longer include any lifestyle choices or paraphilias anymore....

But wait, to wake yourself up from this nightmare, remember that one disclaimer in the definitions of illness: “the symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning”. Despite the unfortunately high prevalence of pedophilia in this world, the fact that it is harmful makes it not classifiable as a variant of normality we will/should all just accept. Child sexual abuse has no advantages except to the perpetrator, it’s an abuse relationship, a two-party transaction with only one person benefiting. In legal terms they would equate this to at least theft. You can’t steal from a child and say he consented because he would trade in a bar of gold for a simple candy, lacking that knowledge of how things done today can affect your whole life to come. You can’t just say homosexuality is the same as pedophilia because they are both types of sexual interactions; so is heterosexual intercourse, and why do less people compare that to pedophilia? Because there are differences!

From 2006 to 2010 there existed a political party in the Netherlands (PVND) that provided political advocacy for pedophile groups and organisations. One of their agendas was to legalize child pornography and to lower the legal age of consent to sex down to 12 years old. Commonly pedophile groups argue that children have the ability (and so the right) to enjoy sexual activity alone, with their peers, or with an older adult. Consequently, they argue, if the child consents to the sexual contact, then it should be legal for the adult/s to engage so with them. They’ll go so far as to argue that sexual contact with children is “good for them” and their development. Of course the issue that is of concern to other (non-pedophile) adults is that children’s ability to consent is limited by their experience and knowledge of consequences. A child can know that candy has a pleasant flavour, for example, and he can decide / consent to eat that given to him by his parent or friend, but the consequences of eating a piece of candy (e.g. early tooth decay, or not wanting to eat the rest of his dinner afterwards) are hardly the same as “consenting” to sexual activity. The consequences of childhood sexual abuse are commonly seen in our psychiatric wards, in the patients we all struggle to interact with: the personality disordered, the limitless cases of deliberate self-injury and drug abuse, the repeat victims of domestic abuse who go around either recreating or trying to erase their childhood experiences. This is too sad – and the worst thing we can do is blame the child, say he or she “consented”.

Pedophiles abuse people; they cause harm. This is not a time- or era-dependent opinion. It is so not the same as homosexuality or heterosexuality or any other way competently-consenting adults choose to interact sexually. And I think we have all come to that same conclusion. The only thing for us as a society still to debate about this and many other negative actions towards other human beings (e.g. murder) is whether such acts constitute criminality or mental illness, and which are the best ways to decrease our childhood sexual abuse rates.

(Sorry for the discussion on homosexuality together with pedophilia, I was obviously mainly aiming to contrast not compare.)