Re: Gender Segregation Today...

Let's run gender segregation through my breakdown of what the boylove movement has historically advocated. That's column one in the table below: Thesis Antithesis Synthesis Norm Adjacency Sex is good Rape culture Feminism Gender Sex workers Boys decide Grooming Youth liberation Age Transboys/Tomboys No sex police The nanny state Anarchism Identity RSOs/SVPs Of course I am not assuming you endorse my analysis. I am sure you don't. But I think this perspective has some history behind it, and should be taken seriously. 1. Sex is good. My understanding of the rationale for gender segregation is that sex between boys and girls is not good. This isn't completely sex negative, since the flip side is that sex between men and boys is good. Reich thought suppressing boy-girl sexuality was part of the pathology that led to fascism, but then he seems to have been against adults having sex with kids in general, so maybe we disregard him. So, maybe half credit. 2. Boys decide. Not sure how you get around this one. Seems pretty clear to me that, given a choice, boys would prefer to have sexual access to girls. And to be around girls in general, at least starting pretty early in adolescence. Your argument has to be that they may want this, but it isn't what is best for them. This is a deal breaker for me. If we don't stand for youth agency, then we are just debating other adults about what is best for kids, with a shared assumption that their own opinions are irrelevant. I think we lose that debate, but even if we could win it, I am not interested in going there. So, no points for gender segregation here, at least unless you can produce some evidence that boys are on board. 3. No sex police. One of the most serious ways feminism went wrong was its carceral turn. Even if it was right to critique the hegemonic heteronormativity, by appealing to the anti-sex surveillance state to enforce feminist norms it dug its own grave. The state will only ever serve its own agenda. A return to gender segregation would hand the state a powerful new tool for policing sex. Or rather, it would revive an old tool -- one which though largely blunted in high income industrialized nations has never gone out of style in much of the rest of the world. Gender segregation does seem to have facilitated pederasty in the past. But where it did, and where it persists today, it also restricted female participation in public life. We have abundant evidence that the modern state is avid to aggressively police any sexuality it regards as deviant, and age gap sex in any form is clearly among the types of deviant sexuality it is most anxious to police. The feminist movement has significantly empowered state sex policing. The last thing we should do is empower it further. hugzu ;-p