"Sex offender are the new queers"

[QuentinSummers]

This stupid article in the Huffpo. I'm absolutely raging. I suppose at least it's an illustration of what queer theory actually means.
m.huffpost.com/us/entry/3386970

^"There is a widespread assumption that all sex offenders are child molesters, pedophiles, and violent rapists. This is not true. A large spectrum of acts are considered sex offenses. These include public nudity, urinating in public, public masturbation, peeping, photographing or videotaping without consent, consensual sex with a 17-year-old, sexting, and downloading unlawful pornography; many of these acts will put the offender on the public registry. There is no single “type” of sex offender; they can be from any walk of life, and any race, class, gender, or sexuality. They are fathers, mothers, brothers, teachers, and friends. Let me be clear: I am not advocating for the legitimization of these acts as appropriate. A forceful, coercive, violent sexual assault is not to be tolerated." But voyeurism, public masturbation, taping etc all fine because it's just a kink?

Then he uses the case of a 19 year old lesbian prosecuted for having consensual sex with a 15 year old girl as a prime example of how sex offenders are discriminated again. Oh come off it! How much more of an atypical, sympathy inducing case could you find?

I'm so angry!

"I had assumed that, as queers and allies, my friends would have a greater sensitivity to the persecution sex offenders face in American society. I have since come to realize that queer folk are not more prone to find empathy for this population."

WTF? Why on earth should a "queer" have more sympathy to a sex offender than anyone else? That's pretty offensive actually - surely implying that homosexuals are a bit like sex offenders is homophobic? (And not very original).

Ugh! How offensive! Abusive, non consensual acts like voyeurism and exhibitionism are illegal for a reason. If your sexuality depends on them then you need therapy. Whereas being gay or bisexual is...totally not the same thing.

I read this the other day and pretty sure that case wasn't mentioned then - wonder if it's been added to try and sound more sympathetic?

Poor old misunderstood, persecuted public masturbators, when do they get their Pride day, hey?

When will the queer community FINALLY embrace those brave souls taking upskirt photos and pissing in the street? It's exactly the same as being gay, right?

This article is despicable.

Well the façade of queer theory seems to be slipping - god knows how on earth they ever managed to tag perversions onto consensual sexual relationships but clearly this is the end goal of the bleating about not "kink shaming".

It's so individualistic isn't it? Poor old voyeurs. Why can't people just accept their peeping is a fetishism and doesn't mean any harm? Individuals sexual satisfaction is more important than the right of a person not to be used as wanking fodder against their wisges

Huh? How weird. I had thought it was an article on how old men who want to perv on girls by sneaking into the women's changing room wearing a dress and a wig, are now considered part of the queer community.

Traditionally, sex offenders were protected and idolized. That they aren't anymore is progress.

(And teenage lesbians aren't sex offenders. Just because they're persecuted as such doesn't mean they are.)

No. I don't accept it. Not at all.

I read this from another site and I was rather disgusted to be honest.

God knows what the point of all that is. Unless it's to legitimise sexual offences.

And yes, I'm sorry but a man wanking in public is every bit as much an offender as a paedophile. The sentence will reflect the fact that there are grades to sexual offending.

It doesn't mean that less sexual offences should be come acceptable because God knows a man can't have an orgasm whenever, wherever and in whomever he likes.

He mentions paedophilia, doesn't he? And then bangs on about a pair of teenage lesbians.

As if one is anywhere near the same thing as the other.

But he doesn't mention paedophilia again.

Why's that? Is he trying to break down barriers slowly?

Violation by degree?

Paedophilia will be the next thing he tries to legitimise.

It's the same MO as we saw back in the 60s and 70s when PIE tried to piggy-back on the back of gay liberation to attempt to legitimise rape of children. This time they're trying to piggy-back on queer politics. Anything that violates another person's consent is still vile, immoral and (mercifully for now) illegal.

Paedophilia has been justified by some people.

There have been threads on FWR where paedophile apologists have stated that it's just another sexual orientation. And people have agreed with this.

And some bollocks about virtuous paedophiles like they're and actual thing.

I thought it was an interesting point of view. I can't really see anything to be outraged about...

Sex offence is a term used to cover many, very different types of behaviour - clearly true

Society labels all types of sex offence as Deviant - also obviously true

Society used to label homosexuality as Deviant too - true

Sex offences and homosexuality are both underpinned by sexual desires - seems plausible enough....

Therefore there are some parallels between society attitudes towards and treatment of sex offenders in the current day and the GBLT community in the past. That doesn't seem like an outrageous opinion to me. The vilification and vitriol expressed towards e.g voyeurs or exhibitionists isn't far removed from the language commonly used to condemn homosexuals in the relatively recent past.

Ok cake, but it was wrongly used against homosexuals whereas it is correctly used against people who offend against others. I think there should be some empathy towards those with perverse orientations, and treatment, but not tolerance.

The difference being that gay people are both consenting to sex so it doesn't affect anyone else what they do. In most sex offences, at least one person involved isn't consenting. (Indecent exposure being a possible exception; but then if there was noone around to complain it wouldn't be reported as a crime).
Why does a (mainly male) persons desire for orgasm through indulging a kink out weigh another (mainly females) desire not to be the subject of a random persons sexual thrill?

He says "A forceful, coercive, violent sexual assault is not to be tolerated" suggesting sex offences that don't involve violence or coercion are fine. It is male entitlement to sex at it's worst.

Xenophile, I'm mentally taking a deep breath because I think this is going to be a difficult one to explain. There's a difference between saying from a psychological perspective that someone has a sexual orientation, and saying that sexual orientation is desirable or morally justifiable.

It is unfortunately something I've had to do a lot of reading up, due to sexual abuse in my close-ish family. Psychologists find it useful to distinguish between child sex offenders who are paedophiles in the strict sense of the word in that their primary sexual orientation is directed towards children rather than adults, versus child sex offenders who are opportunistically looking for a vulnerable group to latch onto and fairly arbitrarily pick on children as their targets. It matters to make the distinction because offending patterns and likelihood of re-offending are different for the two groups - it matters as a practical issue of policing and drawing up prison intervention and probation plans.

That's not to say that paedophilia is in any sense right, or morally acceptable or anything other than horrendous - but it does matter that psychologists make some attempt to "get inside the heads" of people like this to work out how to deal with them. (Personally my non-liberal side says "put 'em up against a wall and shoot 'em", but my liberal side accepts that this leads to a society so authoritarian as to be not worth living in).

So saying "paedophilia is a sexual orientation" is not necessarily apologism - it can be an attempt to offer a psychological explanation of behaviour without condoning that behaviour, an explanation offered in order to make an important distinction in terms of the dangers posed by various groups of sex offenders.

(Of course there are twats out there who make the move from "it's how they are" to "we must have sympathy with them" to "we must excuse their behaviour" - but those people are twats).

That doesn't explain at all why it should be termed a sexual orientation.

You can make a distinction between people who are only aroused by assaulting children and people who are aroused by assaulting children and other people without using the term sexual orientation.

Whenever I see the word "queer" I know I'm in for some right-on bollocks. It seems to be a favourite word of transactivists et al.

FWIW, most mental health professionals view it as a paraphilia/fetish and not an orientation.

I was about to say that I didn't mean to imply that it was natural or inevitable, and in fact that it's more likely a paraphilia.

Not sure what part of me trying to explain that I find it morally abhorrent and repugnant to act on paedophilic urges people are missing in what I've tried to say. I'm trying to say that unless we make an attempt to understand the patterns of behaviour of people with those urges, we can't police them effectively.

It's the groundwork for normalising paedophilia and the inevitable consequence of 'identity'. If this is what I am, how can it be wrong?

It's broader than paedophilia amab. It's all kinds of fetishes and paraphilias.
I don't know why men equate not being able to indulge a fetishism with oppression. It makes my skin crawl. But maybe I'm just too vanilla.

How long before we start talking about the "the extreme marginalization, lifetime institutionalization, and oppression of people who have violated sex laws" like rape, or sex motivated murder?

The offender in my family turns out to be a sociopath and opportunist - and there's a wealth of evidence that psychopathy/sociopathy are partly genetic. That doesn't for a moment excuse what he does. It doesn't allow him to say he couldn't help it. It doesn't make what he did to his victims any less horrific.

I ended up having to discuss this stuff with his offender management team not because I wanted to but because I had to - I had to know how to keep my child safe given that he was back out in the community and while parts of the family had gone NC with him (as I had), other parts had not. It was not an experience I enjoyed or want to repeat.

Maybe we're at cross purposes - for me "understanding" means in the sense of a scientist understanding an intellectual problem, which I want to do as a pragmatic solution to a very real world problem. I don't mean "understanding" in the sense of "offering empathy, being understanding of someone's problems." I certainly don't feel empathy, as I say, my knee-jerk reaction is to put them up against a wall and shoot them, or lock them up and throw away the key.