Abridged from source. Source in title. [Opinion. What—for you—is the age of consent? Sure, there’s jailbait but don’t think about it in arbitrary, moralistic terms regarding the law. NAMBLA was part of the gar rights movement for a decade until everyone became so politically-correct. Would we say ‘woke’ now. What I’m getting at is voluntary sex, not prostitution or grooming or rape. When Allen Ginsberg was asked what age he would bed, he said: “They should have hair.”] The Paedophilia Debates: Feminism, Gay Liberation and NAMBLA Joanna Bourke: 6 May 2025 SOURCE: https://www.joannabourke.com/post/the-paedophilia-debates-feminism-gay-liberation-and-nambla Historically, intergenerational heterosexuality between a very young girl and much older man has, in fact, been the norm, even institutionalized in marriage. In the U.S. at the end of the nineteenth century, the difference between the ages in which a girl’s “yes” was legally deemed to be meaningful could be as young as seven in Mississippi and Alabama and as high as eighteen in Kansas and Wyoming. Simply by stepping over a state line, a person status as a sexual subject was dramatically different. Intergenerational sex between men and boys has a long history asnormal, not aberrant. We just have to think of ancient Greece, Renaissance Florence, the classical Ottoman Empire, and samurai-Era Japan. In modern times, queer icons such as Oscar Wilde, Allen Ginsberg, and Michel Foucault (to name just three) routinely engaged in sexual activities with males considerably younger than themselves, with little or no disapproval until recent years. Numerous historians of homosexuality have shown that, before the 1920s, working-class boys in Victorian London openly traded sex with wealthier, older men for money and other favours. In understanding such activities, we need to acknowledge that, while today, our emphasis is on age, in the nineteenth century, it was on class. This is one reason why we need to be wary about talking about ‘consent’, a very modern idea burdened with ideas about some kind of (often imaginary) equality. Looked at historically, it is more accurate to ask whether sexual partners were ‘willing partners’ rather than ‘consenting’ ones. Once way I can illustrate this is by turning to Rachel Hope Cleves’ important biography of an early twentieth century British writer Norman Douglas (see her book Unspeakable). Although Douglas was well-known to be a pederast, this was not considered disreputable. The reason for this was the boys he had sex with were willing partners. Indeed, Douglas’ archive allows us to hear the ‘child’s voice’; Cleves has analyzed the loving letters they wrote to him, sometimes spanning their entire lives. For these boys, intergenerational sex was personally, intellectually, and financially productive, not inevitably traumatic, as is assumed today. Language matters. There are major differences between ‘pederasty’, which had positive (as in, the older man playing a mentoring role) as well as negative connotations, and ‘pedophilia’, When did the moral repugnancy for intergenerational sex between urnings (the word that used to be used for what we call ‘homosexual men’) develop? We can see signs of this from the late nineteenth century, as gay men were beginning to organize politically and socially. They saw pederasty as a barrier to respectability. However, this repudiation of intergenerational sex between boys and men dramatically increased from the 1970s, with the rise of self-identified gay organisations such as NAMBLA, and came to a head in the 1990s. NAMBLA was founded in 1977. They wanted to eradicate age of consent laws, arguing that sexuality should be based only on sexual attraction. The age of consent laws, they maintained, were moralistic, archaic, and damaging to all parties involved. They insisted that they were not deviant, but ordinary, middle-class (white) men who enjoyed noncoerced sex with willing young boys. By the 1990s, NAMBLA was said to have 25,000 members. Because (as I will turn to briefly in a minute) they were seen as similar to other minorities within gay and lesbian communities. NAMBLA: https://www.nambla.org
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