At a societal level

[pickledandpuzzled]

I think we have been thinking about safeguarding wrong. We design it on the basis that a small minority of people are predatory monsters, and everyone else is ok.

Observation suggests that many people are uninterested in the agency of others, and given the opportunity will use others for their benefit. Other people are possessions, trophies, staff.

The article below suggests a huge proportion of men will offend if they can get away with it.

How should we structure safeguarding, if that’s the case? What will a safe society look like, and how do we reach it?

https://apple.news/ArOEhJbJ1R1GNjarVdZJuEQ

I can understand why sometimes people chafe at safguarding.

Some things have a pretty minimal effect, record checks being one example. They probably function better as a liability thing. There are a few abusers it may catch, but the vast majority don't have any record. So it is a thing that organizations, particularly small ones, have to spend time and money on with minimal value.

It's also a very one size fits all thing. I live in a small village, the school has about 50 children. Some are members of a rural life organization that does quite a bit of programming. The leaders are community members. Membership is never huge given our population but since covid there is still a lot of rebuilding going on.

New rules mean that it's very difficult to have meetings. They all have to be two leaders deep, and the leaders can't be married. So a couple kids going over to the dairy barn across the road to work with their cows and get some instruction from the farmer can't, unless they can find someone other than the farmer's spouse to be there too. Which is very difficult and actually probably impossible. What makes it worse is the next hour after that the same kids are there with the farmer getting paid to lug manure around or something, with no second person in sight. But it's not a group meeting so doesn't count.

The group is left with the options of dissolving because they can't operate, or fibbing about what they are doing.

It makes people cynical about the whole thing.

Yes. I’ve seen similar dynamics. It’s also really hard in a small community when children can come over for a sleepover, no problem, but can’t go out to Sunday school for 30mins in the next room because there isn’t another helper.

It won't be a popular view on MN but sometimes children are guarded by their parents so carefully that it leaves them unprepared once they go out into the world. They're used to having someone with them all the time until their teenaged years and yet they have access to the net through tech, their parents give them smart phones because all the other kids have got one, yes, you can block access on them but the kids are tech savvy, they work around blocks, and there's a whole bunch of predators out there waiting to say hello. Sadly no safeguarding is enough when your child is young and naive and they haven't learnt to see the danger coming.

To me the 'extreme' loosening of morals is seen in things like kink on display in public places e.g. men dressing in pup fetish, baby fetish gear. Things like the scat and piss gathering that was held in SF in recent months. People (largely men) forcing their sexual behaviours into the presence of non-consenting adults and children is just wrong.

It’s things like teachers taking RSE lessons into detailed extremes. It’s basically treating children as though they were young adults and giving them knowledge and expectations that they aren’t capable of processing at their age. It’s also society telling girls (and young women) that OnlyFans is a viable career option and counting down the days till a girl is legally able to sell sexually explicit content online.

Today, more so than the culture of the 80s & 90s (and even 00s ‘raunch culture’,) I think that media, capitalist enterprises in general, and even legislators are seeing sexualising and removing boundaries in much of every day life as liberalism. And I think it’s causing damage to society that will remain with us for a long time.

I think it's just becoming apparent to many of us that the abandonment of the idea of social norms, or the view of them as oppressive and unnecessary, has led to a license for men's sexuality to be expressed without boundaries.

I think we totally underestimated the power of male sexuality in it's seeking for novelty and extremes and that without careful restrictions of this through social expectations using shame, judgement and ostracisation, it would just run riot in in gleeful opportunity to push previous boundaries further and further.

Safeguarding isn't going to be able to address all of this.
At what point is a man in leather thong on a float a safeguarding risk?
At what point is a man with fake breasts at your conference a safeguarding risk?
Or a man in a dress and high heels at your team meeting?
Or a man who shares his furry porn online who works in a care home?

We've abandoned morality as an argument and we're left with scant legal frameworks which just can't cover what we've thrown out.

To me the 'extreme' loosening of morals is seen in things like kink on display in public places e.g. men dressing in pup fetish, baby fetish gear. Things like the scat and piss gathering that was held in SF in recent months. People (largely men) forcing their sexual behaviours into the presence of non-consenting adults and children is just wrong.

Well that was the next stage. Porn stopped being on the top shelf or annonymous videos, but became blatant in families sitting rooms. (Quite a few celebrities who are not what any of us would want to be influencers took about porn being the norm at home.) The next stage was queer politics taking it one step further.

Whereas in the past a Gay Liberation March would have just seen men and women who looked like every day members of the public, got swapped by the queer contingent who implied being same sex attracted was about kink. And look how commercially sucessful drag and outright kink has become something that hen parties visit clubs for.

It is the complete opposite of women's liberation which idealistically thought through talking and gentle pressure men might realist that women have different views then them. Instead men just assumed women would want to join their men's club.

Once the social "norm" that women would be too shocked or upset by rampant male sexual behaviour ceased to the standard by which there was social interaction, there was nothing to stop men pushing the boundaries.

And any attempts by women to challenge this male view just got women labeled as old fashioned or prudes. (Quite a few women who were eager to denounce Mary Whitehouse at the time, now say she was right even though arguing from a different view point.)

And then the expanded gay culture into queer culture expanded further into the T culture and we all know where that has landed us.

I think feminism followed the route of abandoning discussion of sexual morality, of failing to acknowledge how different mens sexuality is from women's, how necessary it for there to be civilising codes and expectations around mens sexuality to protect women and children.

Instead we got liberation for women from all sexual codes, with the belief that liberation for women meant allowing women to exhibit male sexual behaviour equally. I bought into this in the ladette culture of the 90s and believed I was embodying feminism in my promiscuity. All of this made possible by the pill of course.

But we weren't just 'liberating' women from the shackles of oppressive sexual behaviour codes we were also removing the ability to discuss or have any expectations around moral sexual behaviour at all. For men or women.

And what we're seeing now is: the acceptance of porn, sex work, kink, all public and without the language or shared moral codes to object.

I think we've forgotten about the first wave feminists who were proposing the emancipation of women within a very moral framework. For women and men to become the most virtuous selves they could be, with the expectation that meant in faithful relationships. They still used the language of character, morality and virtue as central to what is being aimed for. We've abandoned all that language.

Mary Wollestonecroft said:

In this work I have produced many arguments, which to me were conclusive, to prove that the prevailing notion respecting a sexual character was subversive of morality, and I have contended, that to render the human mind more perfect, chastity must more universally prevail, and that chastity will never be respected in the male world till the person of a woman is not, as it were, idolized, when little virtue or sense embellish it with the grand traces of mental beauty, or the interesting simplicity of affection

Mary Wollestonecroft also said:

Men and women must be educated, in a great degree, by the opinions and manners of the society they live in.

She was no believer in the find yourself and express yourself however you like culture that we now have. She believed we needed a culture which civilises men and women to be their higher moral selves not the base 'true' self with no civilising culture we now seem to hold in the highest place.

Safeguarding can't replace culture.

Mary Wollestonecroft also recognised the problem of unboundaried male sexuality, but her solution was higher expectations for men around chastity, which she believed women's emancipation would bring about.

Instead we got women's emancipated to have sex like men, viewed as a moral good, and alongside it sexual freedom generally as 'good'.
But we now see and she knew, male sexuality needs to be civilised. And codes around sexual behaviour are important to protect women.

The little respect paid to chastity in the male world is, I am persuaded, the grand source of many of the physical and moral evils that torment mankind, as well as of the vices and follies that degrade and destroy women; yet, at school, boys infallibly lose that decent bashfulness, which might have ripened into modesty at home.

Excellent posts Malaga and Retire - lots there to think about.

And yes, safeguarding can’t be a bandage for permissiveness that undermines protections for vulnerable people and children.

I feel like Bill Maher when he says he hasn’t become more conservative with age, he still holds the same Lefty values he always did but the political left has moved so far to the left, and become so enmeshed in identitarianism, that he’s now considered centre-right by the Left.

I think in referring to feminism, you are probaly thinking of the concept of feminism as filtered through the media. ie media feminism that has very little to do with what activists and campaigners are saying or doing.

And 2nd wave feminists spent a lot of time discussing family, power relationships, and sex. So to say they followed the route of abandoning discussion of sexual morality is inaccurate and ahistorical.

I pointed out that the "error" if that is what it was, was in thinking men would listen to women talking about and explaining why they want change. Basically some men may have paid lip service but society as a whole did not put pressure on men to change.

In fact the system / the patriarchy went out of its way to misrepresent what women were saying and wanting. They created the ladette representation of women's "liberation" out of which 3rd wave feminism happily took up the notion of liberation being porn and prostitution. And all those boomer feminists were boring old Karens.

And even if there was something to say feminism as articulated at any point in time was better than another, if society as a whole isn't bothered to listen, means its totally irrelevant.

The problem is, as we are now experiencing, that like it or not women have no power, impact or influence over men. Men happily continue down the road of their inherited privilege because of their sex.

The most obvious example of that was the "sucess" of women's liberation was women being entitled to go out to work and earn their own money. ie not to be tied to the kitchen sink.

The problem was that women niavely thought men would then recognise if women weren't confined to the kitchen, then unpaid work at home should be shared as there were now two bread winners in the home. So women liberated themselves to go out to work, but then found themselves enslaved to doing double the work as they continued to be responsible for the home.

And this was never challenged and men certainly didn't of their own free will, think this isn't fair, we need to work out some equality.

Not forgetting that Thatcherite free enterprise, aided by the sale of social housing, meant that house prices could be hiked to the level where it is now essential that income for a household is dependent on 2 adults working full time.

So if anything I said upthread implied I thought women were in any way responsible for the the culture that men have created and that now infiltrates everything, in no way do I mean that.

What I am saying is that I am afariad it is irrelevant what women discuss or opine on in their own company. Unless and until men think women are worth listening to it makes not difference.

ie the power balance remains as it has for centuries.

And if any one doubts that, we need only to look at what we have experienced with the passing of the GRA and the fallout from that. ie the sucess of the TRAs is amplified and promoted because it suits the MRA agenda.

So no amount of clever posts on FWR, or the various sex based rights campaigns, when 99.9% of men dont listen, or if they do cant be bothered to support women and actually thinks that what women say they want is irrelevant.