A Dark Prophecy

never have I hoped more intensely to be wrong

This issue contains discussion of pedophilia and other types of child abuse.

There is currently a mindless social-media mob who has decided that this essay, in which the survivor of a pedophile (me) expresses fear about where society is headed with regard to that evil, is in fact a thought crime against them. Somehow my essay, which people have to volunteer to read and which is about my own thoughts and feelings, is about them. This is the usual paradigm for an abuse survivor, where your thoughts and feelings are both unimportant and policed by the whole world, so yawn. Business as usual; at least the abusers when I was a kid never pretended to have moral high ground. I am going to turn comments off, though, because these boring mind-readers are boring and I’m not a little kid without choices or agency anymore.

A tweet from Jill Filipovic has moved me to publish my thoughts on where society is heading. Screenshot below, thread here.

It is not hard to attribute personal motivation to a childless woman her age asking to read such stories, and many on twitter did. People tend to question their previous choices as they age, and the choice not to have children is a major one. Naturally, it would be attractive to read stories of people who made a different choice but wish that they had made the same choice you did. My concern is not with her motivation, however, but with the consequences. In the shallow way that Twitter permits, I commented on one aspect of it. I run tweet delete every couple of weeks, so this link will eventually die, but for now my thread is here.

As my tweet implies, I did indeed have the experience of finding out for a fact that my parents regretted having me, and it did intense damage. That’s not what’s important here, though. It’s what such a suggestion from such a prominent voice portends. And the comments in the thread from people eager to read such essays indicate that our culture is already accepting of such a thing.

Our culture is moving towards the destruction of childhood innocence in many respects, but I see two in particular as very dangerous. Together, I predict they are headed in the same direction.

The first of the two is this one: normalizing the regretting or hating of children.

Yes, some parents regret becoming parents. There are reddit threads where such people discuss it, and I’ve spoken to two therapists who have treated parents in this predicament. To their credit, the ones in therapy were trying desperately to fix themselves so their feelings wouldn’t do damage to their kids, and as such, would never publish such thoughts.

Normalize? Hell, No.

This is something that should be stigmatized. It’s a thought that should be so taboo that you either create a burner account on reddit and change the details so nobody can ever find out it was you, or you tell it only to your therapist, who is legally bound to keep your secret, or you keep it to your damn self and do your best to behave in such a way that your children never guess. Some things should be taboo, and regretting the existence of your offspring is one of them. The failure to bond with and love one’s offspring is a massive failure, and it should be one that people feel bad about—evolution itself programs us to prioritize and want to succeed at parenting.

Publishing such work can serve no good purpose. The normalizing of such notions is highly likely to make parents who regret their children feel more justified and less ashamed of it, removing motivation to do whatever they have to do to find a way to fix whatever in them has failed so miserably. Parenthood is easier to avoid than it ever has been before; abortion has been legal for nearly 50 years. Contraception is widely available. Childless adults and couples are more commonplace and less weird than ever before; men can freeze sperm and then get a vasectomy, while women can get birth control of many sorts, including some that require attention only a few times a year or every couple of years. It is not difficult to avoid becoming a parent. We do not need to hear from people who fucked that up and as a result are damaging their kids, and we certainly do not need to give these people big, prominent, respectable platforms.

Our society has been failing children for a long time, and in COVID times, this has gotten far worse. Estimates of children who have just dropped off the radar since March 2020 range from 750,000 to 3,000,000. Teacher unions have successfully kept schools closed in many areas, which is a disaster we will spend decades recovering from—teachers report upwards of 700,000 substantiated cases of child abuse each year, in their capacity as mandated reporters. Children who needed that extra pair of eyes on their well-being have instead been left at home to suffer. Here is just one case, where the monster was too stupid to turn the Zoom camera off first.

Most monsters are smarter.

Normalizing parents who wish their children didn’t exist is an incredible mistake, and it’s one so obvious and avoidable that it’s mind-boggling we seem to be determined to make it—the people clamoring to hear this shit are sickening, and they are many.

Edit: yep, the normalizing continues. Here’s another despicable viral thread, this one mostly with people in favor of it. FFS.

The second area where I see us heading down a dark path is the normalization of childhood transition. Children as young as 8 or 9 (the age when many females reach Tanner stage two) are being permitted to consent to puberty blocking drugs, which are neither harmless nor totally reversible (despite activist rhetoric). Longterm consequences include difficulties with bone density and, when cross-sex hormones follow the blockers (as they nearly always do), the loss of fertility. These side effects are admitted even by organizations fully committed to the activists’ agenda, and scientists and researchers highly sympathetic to those goals. The UK recently had a landmark case ruling where difficult facts about some of these drugs came to light.

Further, they are being given surgery at increasingly early ages (again, despite activist rhetoric). Thirteen year olds are getting mastectomies, as this paper by the most prominent pro-child-transition doctor in the United States discusses. It is well known in discussion groups for parents of trans kids in other places, including the UK, that if you want to get “top surgery” for your child while they are a minor, you have to go to the US.

I have enormous sympathy for trans people. They are a small minority of the population, but one that tends to suffer enormously. It is likely true that some would have benefited from transitioning at an earlier age, but this is not a situation where we have definitive criteria. We can’t run a brain scan or blood test and be sure. Until then, erring on the side of doing the least damage is the only sensible course.

What do these two paths have in common? Where do they lead? The first diminishes children as a special class of people who are entitled to be loved, nurtured, and cherished regardless of the emotional situation of their parents when they are born. The second puts a weight of responsibility on their shoulders that is far too great for what happens to their physical bodies.

Combine the two, and I think we are headed at warp speed for societal conditions that will normalize pedophilia. A being with no inherent right to be loved and protected who is simultaneously regarded as competent to consent to life-altering medical treatment is not a being for whom there is any coherent case to be made that they cannot consent to sex. A 9 year old who is permitted to exercise autonomy to the point of consenting to a life with altered bone density and brain development via medication — in what sense can that person be held incompetent to consent to a sex act with that same body? A 13 year old who is allowed to have her breasts removed by an adult and to head down a path toward vaginal atrophy and the probability of a hysterectomy, all facilitated by adults — in what sense can she be held incompetent to consent to sex with an adult?

Objections, small

A small objection I anticipate is that these two forces seem unrelated, yet I assert that they’re related and sending society to a similar place. Consider that many things can seem unrelated but lead to a particular destination. Bathing less frequently and shopping too much are unrelated, yet combined can spell trouble for a marriage. A sense of doom and arm pain are both signals of a heart attack. Sleeping too little and too much are opposites, yet both are risk factors for depression. These are both symptoms of a societal sickness, and I am predicting that a major symptom to emerge from these will be normalization of pedophilia.

Objections, large

The primary objection I anticipate is that pedophilia is just too egregious and too despised — this could never happen.

In rebuttal, I offer you this. Remember all those statues being torn down or vandalized, and all those schools, buildings, and other places having their names changed, including people who were firmly on “the right side of history,” like Abraham Lincoln, the President who fought the Civil War in part to end slavery, and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier?

This has happened because our culture has grown so intolerant of anything that even hints at the evil of racism, we will now even criticize and demonize people who were extremely progressive for their era; those who arguably set the stage for the greater gains of racial equality in the generations that followed them.

Michel Foucault, one of the most important philosophers behind critical theory, had many ideas that were absolutely foundational to Queer Theory.

Queer Theory upholds the entire ideology of the trans movement, which is the source of one of the two forces pushing us in this dangerous direction.

Why does this matter? Foucault was a pedophile and thus, by definition, a rapist. He (along with Derrida, father of deconstruction and extremely important to the schools of thought the Woke marinate themselves in) advocated for decriminalizing sex between adults and children. And yet he is widely cited, his ideas are foundational to the critical race theory that our cultural elites defend vociferously, and nobody is demanding an end to critical studies or a rejection of Queer Theory because its foundation being tainted by his evil makes critical theory amount to “systemic pedophilia.” None of the objections and arguments that the “anti-racist” movement uses applies at all to Foucault, Derrida, and the other deconstructionists, critical theorists, etc., who promoted this evil.

So, at the very least, it is arguable that our culture now regards racism as worse than pedophilia. That means pedophilia has grown significantly more accepted and less despised, even in my short life.

Combine that force with the cultural forces causing children to be seen more and more as burdens, including the constant agonizing over how expensive they are and the denigration of having children young; the breaking down of the taboo against failing to love one’s children, as the Filipovic tweet and the responses to it show; the phenomenon of child drag stars; and the promotion of children being given irresponsible levels of bodily autonomy, as the most intense branches of the trans activist movement shows….and it is hard to imagine that the taboo against pedophilia will still exist in twenty years. I expect it to be significantly weaker in two years and perhaps to no longer count as a taboo in less than ten.

If I believed in any gods, this is the moment when I would pray that I am wrong.