I am not any kind of expert in this area but I have read accounts that suggest that pedophilia [sic] is an extremely stubborn mental disorder. Many pedophiles genuinely seem to believe that quite young children are sexually attracted to them. Whether it’s a kind of mental self defence against accepting the truth, or whether it’s a genuine malfunction of the brain, is quite another matter.
It is a condition, though. Benjamin Britten, the English 20th century composer, was an ephebeophile - he was attracted to adolescent boys. I have known people who knew Britten, and he was watched over - especially by Peter Pears - to ensure that he did nothing criminal. One person who knew Britten well made the interesting comment that he didn’t want power over them or sex, he was just totally infatuated with boys who were great singers.
Because people appreciated this he was treated more as if he had an unfortunate disability than a potentially dangerous psychological condition.
You could say that this happened because he was, incidentally, possibly the greatest composer of the century. Or you could say that people recognised that he did not want to abuse children.
To me it shows how complicated the whole thing is and suggests that there are several different disorders involved. I do think that some people do not care about others through genetic causes, and that others absorb the climate. Society and the media may affect the way they express their sociopathy, but you need the seeds to take root in the different soils.
It is an interesting subject.
I have read a lot of Dodgson literature, partly because my subject in sociology of religion related to the 19th century and the effect of scientific progress on the Church of England.
Under the rules of the time, only Heads of Houses at Oxford could marry. Not only that, but once girls reached a certain age they had to be chaperoned and were soon married off. This meant that academics either had to leave or be celibate with little social contact with women. There is a fair bit of evidence that Dodgson liked women and would have wanted to have a family, but his career as a mathematician would then have ended and he would not have wanted to end up as a country parson. (It is even faintly possible that he had an affair with Julia Margaret Cameron).
Dodgson liked children as children. He appreciated Alice Liddell’s intelligence - which comes over in the Lewis Carroll books - and corresponded with girls, working on interesting ways to teach symbolic logic. tl;dr I suspect him of being a frustrated Victorian paterfamilias who had to sublimate his desires.
I went as Alice one year in college, as a foil to my friend’s most excellent Mad Hatter costume (I’m pretty sure I was mainly invited as his partner for the evening due to my resembling the Disney version of Alice). We both got quite into the research. My conclusion was the same, that Dodgson enjoyed the company of children but wasn’t a creeper.
He was surrounded by young men who he saw all the time. At the time the idea of serious education for women was a bit of a joke. Dodgson went in for a tireless correspondence with his female friends in which he introduced them to some quite advanced mathematical ideas. He even campaigned to allow children to read books during boring sermons in church, scandalising the Low Church, and arrived at the theological conclusion that the way to reconcile the idea of a loving god with the idea of Hell was to assume that Hell existed but it was empty - an elegant application of set theory which also did not go down well in some circles.
Dodgson wasn’t a feminist in a recognisable modern form, but he certainly was alongside improving the status of women.
Almost like some folks in high places are spreading FUD. Then find an egg or two (bonus degradation if it’s someone they already violated once) to take the fall.
Not to kick the hornets nest again, but I think TERF is a slur, the author of the piece makes a distinction between what she feels are “TERFs” and what she feels are “RadFems” - but the average person does not. And I’ve honestly never seen it used without accompany swears and threats of violence, so if its used a slur, its a slur.
We live in a time when academic research is being shut down for fear of public reaction (aka being called a TERF or labelled transphobic)… and thats terrifying to me.
I think “don’t call me cis” makes it much harder to discuss certain issues. I think “terf is a slur” is intended to make it much harder to discuss any of these issues.
Yes, some people misuse the term. It’s not like Dirt or Germaine Greer are any kind of radical feminist, so they can’t be trans-exclusionary ones. No, that doesn’t make it a slur. People have to be able to talk about political movements.
I’m digging out from under grant submission season, but do you have more info on this? I haven’t been able to find any source that doesn’t have a particular viewpoint, and especially not one that actually expresses the university’s viewpoint. This is the type of thing that academic freedom is meant to cover, but working with human subjects (especially about privileged medical info) is bound up in a lot of red tape.
Technically, my contacts are a replacement for lenticular eyeglass lenses (if you have to google that*, count yourself lucky). So, they are indeed more powerful than standard contact lenses. However, with my contact lenses, I have 20/20 vision. So, I need something super-powered to be normal, which makes me one of the most pointless cyborgs ever.
*yeesh. I just googled that to say I did, and I never realized that eyeglass fetishism was a thing. It’s apparently just about all that comes up. Here’s a SFW example of lenticular lenses, in case anyone is interested:
Also, since this is Not Feminism 101 after all, are breast enhancements counted as a cyborg enhancement, as the article would lead me to believe? They are much larger than expected in nature, but largeness isn’t a super power.
