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Cast your mind back - if you can - to the mid-2010s; to the brief high-noon of NOMAP (non-offending minor-attracted whatever). VirPed was on the ascent, and its leaders were even posting here from time to time trying to drum up support and brandishing a big stick at anyone deemed insufficiently virtuous. Prostasia was still a couple of years out from getting the public support of the Queen of Sweden, B4UAct was holding public symposiums and publishing articles in mainstream newspapers, and a self-professed NOMAP called Todd Nickerson was doing the press circuit trying to convince people that paedophiles are really super chaps so long as they can keep their filthy paws off kids' silky drawers. One of the most prominent voices in this brief liberal discourse was a Canadian psychologist (I know!) called Deborah Soh. Dr Soh completed her PhD in psychology at York University in 2016 under Keith Schneider and longtime friend of the show James C*ntor. Her PhD thesis was titled: "Functional and Structural Neuroimaging of Paraphilic Hypersexuality in Men" (meaning, I gather, prying around in the brains of dirty perverts). In 2015, Soh published an article for Salon expressing sympathy with a paedophile she had attempted to treat, and also mentioning Todd Nickerson - who had previously published an article for the same title - in warmly respectful terms. (Nickerson's article was removed from the Salon online archive in 2017 folowing a significant outcry and a subsequent change in editorial policy.) Nevertheless, Soh published another article in the far-from liberal Globe and Mail in 2018. Her line or argument here is pretty brown-bread turgid NOMAP fare, but interesting given her more recently espoused positions: Roughly 1 per cent of the population is pedophilic, translating to 76 million people worldwide. Statistically speaking, every one of us knows at least one person who is a pedophile. Contrary to what common folklore might have you believe, pedophiles appear no differently, on the surface, from anyone else in your community. Over the following few years, Soh appears to have undergone something of a conversion on more than one front. Part of this seems to have had something to do with leaving academia (or, one might less charitably say, failing to find a university department anywhere that was willing to offer a job). Having been unable to secure an academic position, Soh instead decided to carve out a niche for herself as a "commentator" and "author," slagging off academics and academia in a manner that in no way resembles sour grapes. At around this time, her views on many subjects became quite a lot less nuanced. Whereas early in her career Soh had written fairly judiciously on the subject of gender identity and transitioning, by the time she published her book The End of Gender (2020) Soh seems to have been staking out her posture as TERF edgelord. (To be fair I haven't read it, and struggle to find any reviews of it at all from reputable publications, but note that the book is prominently praised by Ben Shapiro, Douglas Murray, Dicky Dawkins, Stephen Pinker, Ray Blanchard and Simon Baron-Cohen - so draw your own conclusions, I guess.) At the same time, Soh has been making the predictable pilgrimage from respectable academic to fearless-and-uncensored-truth-teller via her own podcast, the right-wing platform Quillette, and aparently the network of thinkers [sic] decribed by Bari Weiss (I know!!) as "the intellectual dark-web." (Don't overthink that one.) So it is with some interest that I note Dr Soh has published a new book this year, with the curious title Sextinction. It seems that Soh argues we're having not enough sex, or at least not the right kind, and there's too much porn. But it is her apparent volte-face on the paedo issue that is most interesting to me. From a slaveringly analingual review in the National Post: on pedophilia and child sex dolls (yes, they exist, but are illegal in several countries, Canada included), Soh wrote that she “wouldn’t be surprised if, in a few years, “coming out” as a pedophile will be celebrated by society. The view that nonoffending pedophiles deserve understanding is one I once foolishly supported as a result of my time in academia. It is now something I deeply regret.”I confess I lack the stomach to dig any further into this dreary-looking tome, but on the face of it Deborah Soh seems to have done a complete 180-degree turn in just 8 years: from arguing in 2018 that" we must be willing to have open discussions about this issue without fears that doing so will “normalize” pedophilia or encourage adult-child sex to be viewed as socially acceptable," to maintaining in her new book that we must withold understanding even from the NOMAPs for fear of precisely this tragic outcome. And of course I think she's right. It doesn't matter that her newfound pitilessness is born out of the hullabaloo that surrounded Allyn "Tranny" Walker's A Long, Dark Shadow (2021) and the attendant hysteria about MAP identity. It doesn't really matter that Soh is a vacuous, air-headed weather-vane, pointing whichever way the cultural wind happens to be blowing. That is precisely what makes her so valuable to us. Her logic is infallible. Soh recognises precisely what Walker and the other NOMAP advocates could not admit: that neither liberal nor conservative identity politics is able to defend itself from the inevitable celebration of paedophilia unless that prospect is stamped on with very great force. Logic, consistency and humanity be damned. And that is why the world will never get better for us than it was in 2015. We have had our brief false spring. The tedious Virpeds and the insufferable NOMAPs put up their bold little leaves, and they have been mown down by the very hands that cultivated them. I can't say I have very much sympathy for the bastards - perhaps no more than Deborah Soh has - but they at least do us the service of a clockwork canary in an electronic coal-mine. Our moment has passed us by, thank God. Das Paedo-Schwing ist schon geschwungen. And we barely even noticed it. |