I think Lavery aims to be all kinds of offensive with the abortion-erection vileness as some kind of 'enfant terrible' shtick. They're yet another high on their own supply individual, together with the usual narcissist 'accusations are admissions' on twitter in the last few days: Kathleen Stock is, apparently, the naked Emperor, Helen Joyce is not as bright as Lavery as she's 'only' got a doctorate whereas Lavery is a Professor and Lavery doesn't want to show her up. Yeah, right.
Plus what's with all the 'boy/girl' stuff when Lavery must be pushing 40? Enfant terrible stuff is precociously charming in the very young, excusable in the mid twenties because there is still growing up to do but endlessly going 'look at me! look at me!' is just tiresome in people like Lavery, with middle age looming.
Curiously, GL seems somewhat cagey or sensitive about their age - odd when there is so much narcissistic self-absorption and oversharing elsewhere. A first page Google search for their age took me to the farms which was the first result to give an answer (an unreferenced 38 - anyone here an Oxford contemporary of a 'Joseph/Jos Lavery' who can confirm?) where this queasy extract from Lavery's blog is revealing:
I have met, loved, and been loved by the families of many of my partners. The first family who loved me well was that of my first spouse. When we split up, which we did for the reasons I’ve mentioned, the family turned on me, and that was the hardest part of the whole experience. Since I was an orphaned, or at-least-half-orphaned, child, the love of other families was lavished upon me freely, joyously, and temporarily. Of course that family didn’t wish to be kind to me once I had left them. That would have been a category error.
The second spouse, and family, loved me in a very specific way: as people who want to be better than their religious orthodoxy will let them, love a cad whose picaresque charm attracts them, while allowing them to fantasize about saving a soul. That ambivalent desire and repulsion has followed me in a number of domains of my life (I have come to think of it as a trans girl thing), and it tends to be more erotically charged than one would expect. Not the first spouse-mother, but the second and the third spouse-mothers, had little crushes on me.
Perhaps mothers have crushes on their kids’ partners; perhaps that is a general thing. Anyway those frissons felt healing and lovely, rather than predatory or unsafe. I knew one would never move beyond the lightest, gentlest flirt once every year or so - it seems ridiculous to even imagine that it could. It was just a spark, a little warmth in the relation that felt secret and shy, a little gentle eroticization that let me know that my new pseudo-mother loved me, that they were at least as attracted to as concerned about the aspects of my personality about which they expressed the most voluble concern. Their bad faith relation to me precluded, in general, honesty with themselves or the world - but this I always knew, and didn’t mind. There is something cruel in me, there. A dicktease for moms.
Lavery, here's the thing, you can't read women for toffee. A heads up. At most, the mums of your multiple spouses were simply humouring you for the sake of their daughters, who had married a 'cad' as you frame it. Too right they were not the ones being 'predatory or unsafe'. I have other words but they would get this deleted.
These mothers had been through the 'look at me' narcissistic toddler stage with their own kids, 'yes dear, of course you are superman', nice smile, move on - and they employed the same strategy with needy you. It's on you, because you misread it as erotic interest. Barf. Though I imagine with extra creep and ick factor for those mums if they felt you were reading 'frissons' into their engagement.
The 'voluble concerns', the 'bad faith', the fact that they were happy to be shot of you at the end of the relationship with their daughter? That proves the category error was (and still very much is) all yours...