Re: Sex and the Modern State

Mass "entertainment" incessantly propagandizes the family. This alone should raise our suspicions. I read Sophie Lewis' short book Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation. It provides useful historical context, but I doubt you would find it worth your time. I have not read The Anti-Social Family by Michèle Barrett, from 1982. Linked below is a short review of those two books. The first Reich passage I cited here is still the best summary I found of his case against the family. In response you described the "kind of family" -- one "embedded in wider social networks" -- that you would prefer to see. I agreed. You said this seems unlikely to be achieved under capitalism. I think Reich would have agreed. MAPs could be a resource for "alloparenting." My view is that the Stranger Danger mythology succeeded in redirecting the anti-family feminism of the 1960s and 1970s into a gentrified pro-family safetyism, where it remains marooned today. Openly MAP participation in alloparenting would require overcoming the current pedo panic. While I support Mu's efforts to take on this task directly, if I am correct that Stranger Danger was aimed at neutering feminism's critique of the family, only a re-invigoration of that critique -- a better feminism and one that returns to its roots in sexual liberation -- can actually lead to more MAP acceptance. (MAP anti-feminism, however deplorable, is too fringe to do much actual harm beyond blinding its adherents to any plausible path forward. If male MAPs who are attracted to girls think the objects of their attraction deserve a better feminism I haven't heard much about it. It seems as though they should. But girl lovers seem to me to be at least as often paternalistic in their outlook as boylovers are.) Here's two short but superficial articles about alloparenting. Reich repeatedly says the authoritarian patriarchal family has been around for thousands of years. But the nuclear family is a more recent development, and alloparenting is arguably part of our longer cultural and evolutionary heritage. Vicki Larson, "There is a better way to parent than the nuclear family" https://aeon.co/ideas/there-is-a-better-way-to-parent-than-the-nuclear-family Diana Divecha, "Alloparenting: Expanding the Community of Love to Help to Raise Your Family" https://www.developmentalscience.com/blog/2021/5/18/alloparenting-expanding-the-community-of-love-to-help-to-raise-your-family hugzu ;-p (https site) Ruth Cashman, Abolish the family? (Workers' Liberty) [@nonymouse] [Guardster] [Proxify] [Anonymisierungsdienst]