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One of the (many) problems I have with VirPed is that - much like its less-virtuous predecessors - it can't seem to decide whether it wants to be a support-group or an advocacy organisation. That's to say, it can't decide whether it exists to be inward or outward-looking: the caring face of paedophilia to the needy insiders or the moraly-pure face to the outside world. This was less of a problem for the likes of PIE and NAMbLA, because those old-school palaeo-paedos didn't think they had to make too many compromises to the values of their culture. And perhaps at that time a strategy of open defiance seemed rational, however dismally it may have failed in retrospect. But the neo-nonces of VirPed and the self-proclaimed MAP movement seem to want to provide (highly conditional) support to their members, while at the same time holding out the possibility that, if only paedophiles could play scrupulously by the rules our society makes, they might merit some measure of wider tolerance, if not actual acceptance, from their society as a whole. I think this attitude could charitably be described as naive. At this point in time it seems almost touchingly innocent to think that paedophiles could be welcomed into the community of sexual minorities if only we could manage to persuade our society that we are no threat to children. The opposite, of course, is true: none of these things matter in the slightest. As the Azov Films fiasco illustrated, once a person is suspected on reasonable grounds of being a paedophile, all the institutions of our society - the law, the media, the high-priests of the human sciences - unify to bring them down by any means possible. Neither truth nor goodness matters a jot. I find the OP's analysis of this case intuitively credible, but I also think it is completely irrelevant. It doesn't matter in the slightest how innocent this particular VirtuePod might be. They will destroy him, and anyone connected with him. His preeminent virtue avails him nothing now. This brings me to two more of the (so very many) problems I have with VirPed. First, there is the fact that our VirtuePods habitually claim that they are the ones who are realists. If you believe the VirPeds, it's us who are hoplessly, neurotically deluded and it is they whose libidos have been duly tamed by the reality principle. The opposite, of course, is true. The hope that paedophiles might be embraced by our society if we could only be well-behaved enough defies all reason and experience. The truth is this: we can never win acceptance. We can never be virtuous enough. We are here to be punished beyond endurance. That is what will happen, time after time. And this relates to the second major problem I have with VirPed and their MAP allies: the fact that their futile attempts to win "acceptance" threaten to make things even worse for us. In reality, there is no way of talking about paedophilia openly except in the grammar of execration and violence, and so it is best for us that we are not talked about at all. The poor little chattering VirPeds must try to learn the art of silence, before they find themselves silenced forever. For all my distaste for VirPed's rhetoric, however, I think the real problem with the new MAP activism is much more fundamental. VirPed likes to distance itself from its more overtly libidinous predecesors: it rightly notes that the sexually-liberated activist movements of yesteryear (such as PIE and NAMBLA) have failed. It wrongly assumes that sexually-repressed activist movements will therefore succeed. But in fact VirPed has far more in common with NAMBLA than it would like to admit. Both are manifestations of the paedophile cult of identity politics. Both imagine - or imagined - that paedophiles can tread the same primrose path as homosexuals and trans people towards social tolerance and open expression. Both assume that telling our stories and sharing our experiences will win over a rational and persuadable public as they did for other now-cherished minorities. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, when the libidinal force of sexual liberation seemed irresistable, such fond daydreams might perhaps have been forgivable. But in our darkening world, where the frontiers of identity politics are already embattled, it seems incredible that anyone would hold out any hope for the cultural advance of paedophilia - already Western homosexuality's repressed unconscious. So here's the bad news: there is, for the moment, no hope at all of the sort that VirPed and other MAP activists sometimes like to dangle before our eyes. In our lifetimes, things are only going to get worse. Maybe a lot worse. And VirPed's very public posturing definitely isn't helping. But here's the consolation: at least we don't have to pretend to be virtuous. Since there is no point at all in trying to woo outsiders with protestations of our immaculate probity - because nobody at all is impressed - we don't need to repress or cheapen or disown our desire just to please other people. In fact, we can stop talking to outsiders altogether and simply close ranks. There is no use at all for paedophile activism, but there is more need than ever for mutual support and concern. We can afford to drop the moral posturing and start just being moral. We need to look after each other, because nobody else is looking after us- and because I have a feeling that there are some very, very dark times ahead of us all, virtuous and vicious paedophiles alike. |