Synopsis
Alas all pipers are paid.This is a minority report, one you will not often find presented anywhere as it has been ruthlessly suppressed; one of the few exceptions is perhaps, in a veiled way, Peter Singer's
Animal Liberation. This is my interpretation of the position of minor attracted adults and the society which oppresses them.
Near AgeAlmost anyone will admit that the age of consent laws are a corrupt line in the sand. There is no difference between a twenty-one-year-old, a nineteen-year-old or a sixteen-year-old, or whatever the age of consent happens to be in your region.
7-11Children have had every right denied them. Their status is either that of the chattel of their parents or of the state. Young people can not own property, form contracts, receive equal treatment before the law, work for personal profit, access information, choose marriage partners, give consent to medical treatment, or other bodily control such as tattooing or piercing; have no freedom to information and media, no right to bear arms, have no freedom of locomotion: both local (bars, residence) and international, have no freedom to choose sexual partners, no right to join an army to fight for their country, no power to hold public office, no right to vote, no freedom to drive a car, no power over diet, alcohol, tobacco, are forced to attend schools and on and on. It would not be a mistake to see in this the general attack on liberties underway in the West and globally. In times past, young people enjoyed all these freedoms, and why not? History is full of young emperors, boy generals, and millions of forgotten heads of households, child-brides and grooms and laboring young people; all quite capable and responsible. In Ancient Rome, age of majority was seven, in Iran today, legal liability starts at six for girls and nine for boys. Young people are quite capable of acting "maturely" when they are not treated like children.
Infants, Animals and the RetardedOne is inclined to think that this group can not consent. This would be right. But it also exposes the contradiction in consent law. Consent law is a capitalist tool to divert attention from the brutal and forced nature of society. It requires no great feat of empathy to perceive that animals do not want to be butchered and eaten, or to understand when dogs enjoy or dislike being pet. In the case of infants and toddlers, do we need their informed consent to feed them, change their diapers, play with them or do other things for them that they like? No. And as it is well known this side of the Victorian Age that children have sexuality, why then do we deny them the pleasures of sex?
HysteriaWhat then is the origin of the hysteria surrounding minor attracted adults? Part of it relates to the archaic notion that parents own their children. But more important is how children have come to be used as the idols for a post-modern society drowning in meaninglessness. The young person is set up as the golden calf of ideal goodness; and in the negative, the pedophile is set up as a neo-Victorian evil for a society otherwise unable, against nihilism, to define evil. This evil then has a further function, namely classic fascist scapegoating. Pedohysteria is a war on terror, a manufactured readymade conspiracy theory for an angry and fearful age.