Subject: Paper on pedophilia, critical approach
From: Terry Raimos (terry_reams@hotmail.com)
Date: Mon Jan 10 2000 - 23:52:48 CST
I am grateful for the people who responded to my questions about pedophila
without
a) suggesting to me that I may be regurgitating because I was doing library
research and
b) telling my about their prolific writing in some area.
Geez, have critical theorists substituted the heirarchy they find in society
with one of their own (my CV is longer than yours?!) In the two and a half
years that I've been a student, I wish I had a buck for every time some prof
arrogantly mentioned their "work", "article" or "book", some of which we are
held captive to buy. It's great that some profs are teachign and doing
research in the same area, and it's clear to me that if you want status, you
have to build it through your publications, not on how well you teach,
interact with your students or deal with contrary opinions. The atmosphere
in our classroom is so sickeningly politically correct that students are
trippping over each other not to slip up and say something like "mankind".
Some - mostly the guys - just shut up, blow the 20% participation grade, and
sweat it out 'cause the course is required for the BA. Most of them will
spew out term papers (60% of the grade!) which conform to the professor's
view of the world.
Before I took this course on deviance, I read some critical work by a
Marxist who made the argument that "the ideas in every epoch... are the
outcome of historical and material preconditions" (badly paraphrased). Okay,
so that applies to drug scares, prostitution, and law enforcement.
But it must also apply to academia as well which explains why there is such
a pile of critical theory (feminism, post-modernism, etc.). New faculty are
increasing as PhDs become commonplace, competing for a few tenured
positions, so the scholarship is directed toward critques of science,
patriarchy, sexism, racism and other constructs which seem to have nothing
in common from one author to the next. It's kind of like Alice in Wonderland
where the "word means precisely what I make it to mean" and there's few
references to the real world except in broad generalizations to fuzzy forces
doing "things" to shape human decisions.
As for the content of the responses about pedophilia, to tell me that human
sexuality and it's control is "socially constructed" is a dead end. What
isn't socially constructed, including this medium and the knowledge which
informs your/our views? But that's not the main concern I have.
If I accept that human sexuality is "normal" or "deviant" depending upon the
material conditions of any historical moment (am I getting the jargon
right?), that response still doesn't explain why some men, and not all,
CHOOSE to sexually assault children. What does it mean to say those "at the
margins" are the perverts? Sounds like a code word for those "with low self
control" or "deviant tendencies".
In another course I took, taught by a correctional therapist, he showed us
the penile responses of pedophiles versus normals to slides of naked
children. How can those results be "socially constructed"? They are the
product of individual differences between men and can't be "explained away"
by simply saying that deviance is "socially constructed". Yeah, I've heard
the argument about professionals to manage new forms of deviance, but that
is _in response_ to the individual differences identified by science. Not
too different from the findings by Robert Hare that psychopaths have very
different brain activity patterns than "normals". So what part of those
colorful brain images are "socially constructed"?
Sorry if I seem abrasive but i don't feel like I have the freedom in class
to really express my feelings/thoughts about the readings and lectures. The
prof seems to have a standard set of answers to any question and if I hear
the "socially constructed" line once again, I think I'm going to drop the
course. Either that or perhaps someone could direct me to a short article
that captures this claim about everything being socially constructed. I am
willing to learn, but given the choice between someone with hard answers
about why some men diddle kids and other don't, sociologists don't seem to
have much to offer, especially if their ideas were to be made into some kind
of program or policy.
Terry Raimos
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