On Oct 24, 2006, at 1:26 PM, JBrown72073 at cs.com wrote:
> Never fully rational in the first place? In the first place there
> were child
> brides, an age of consent of 11, or 13, or in the Bible, what? 3?
> So it used
> to be the law.
The recent American panics about child sexual abuse - the milk carton madness that Susie Bright wrote about, the preschool scandals, Roseanne's recovered memories - may have a rational foundation, but it got wildly blown up to lunatic proportions.
Remember that Ms. magazine article about Satanic ritual abuse? Trust us, it happens! Apparently the factcheckers were forbidden to factcheck the article.
>> I don't get why it's so important that Herbert Apthetker may or may
>> not have abused his daughter. If it is a real social problem to the
>> degree some claim, then theirs is just one case among many.
>>
>
> That's my position. What's surprising to me is all the shocked
> demurrals t
> hat Bettina could possibly be telling the truth.
>
That's certainly not my reaction. Mine would be that she may be
telling the truth, or she may be expressing fantasies (and fantasies
aren't pure inventions, or lies - they usually express some psychic
truth). But just because she says it doesn't make it so.
>> Is the real cause for concern an effort to dredge up some dirt
>> about a dead Stalinist?
>>
>
>
> Neither of them should be smeared. If you think child sexual abuse
> is a
> one-in-a-million monstrosity rather than a particularly damning
> feature of male
> supremacy then you'll think there's something specially monstrous
> about the
> charge and that it's powerfully condemning of everything about the
> perpetrator.
Feature of male supremacy? In the theory/practice enforcement of patriarchy sense, or in the sense that men's propensity to abuse is some sort of psychopathology produced by patriarchy? And if Yoshie's data is right, showing a decline in sexual abuse of children, then that seems rather important.
> And I would never characterize Herbert Aptheker's life and important
> work by describing him as "a dead Stalinist." I hope you wouldn't,
> either.
Nope, but I'm not the one posting thousands of words on the topic.
Doug