I was being deliberately provocative...

and I'm glad it worked! (In the States we often use the positive in sentences like " I could give a flying fuck about youth liberation" even when we mean the negative. I don't know where that came from -- it's casual of course and should not appear in formal prose, but then neither should "flying fuck".) I've been pondering in recent weeks the whole business of "liberating" or "queering" people and institutions and trying to think through what is actually meant. The underlying drive seems to be "perfect" freedom from all bonds of obligation and love (as in you should be able to "love" freely but without obligation -- what kind of love is that?) This is ultimately commodification by another name. So it's okay for a parent to love a child but not to impose any obligation on the child whatsoever. And the child should have perfect freedom to do what he or she wants, parent be damned. And by extension the parent should never allow any obligation to the child to interfere with the parent's perfect freedom. So we end up with a culture of divorce, abortion, "free" love, and gangs of feral fatherless boys -- needless to say, the last remaining obstacle to perfect freedom is the freedom for a man to love one of those boys or one of the boys to love the man. Does anyone seriously think that eliminating this last obstacle to "freedom" would end up in anything other than the rutting boylust that characterized the late Roman Empire? The last is only a thought exercise since it's not going to happen -- groups of young males (usually under the informal leadership of an older male) have been, throughout history, the primary "disrupters" of existing social orders -- why our emerging global slave state so fears the male bond, specifically the younger/older male bond, and brings every legal, cultural, economic, and technological weapon to bear in an endless effort to wipe it out. Here's what I would want to "liberate" boys from (I'll leave it to others to discuss the "liberation" of girls although the hordes of young girls seeking to "transition" sure suggests some thinking on the subject is called for): -- institutions of youth indoctrination (aka public "schools" and universities run by women for girls.) -- growing up without any man in their lives (this is the fate now of a majority of boys, particularly those in "disadvantaged" or "marginalized" groups where most boys grow up in single parent households) -- divorce courts that automatically favor mothers over fathers (other things being equal, boys should be assigned to fathers; girls to mothers -- aside from the fact that divorce should become almost unthinkable) -- a world from which beauty and tradition have been deliberately and systematically eliminated. -- "helicopter" parenting. -- "sex education." Boys can figure things out on their own if allowed to do so. -- a world in which all institutionalized male spaces have been destroyed, leaving boys to clump together under the cover of darkness in what are often the most destructive and pathological ways, That's for starters. SR