[climate of suspicion] versus sensible precautions

It's a topic this blog has avoided like the plague up to this point but L'Ombre has raised the issue of free speech and what constitutes child porn.

He lists two ongoing cases and builds his case, quoting:

The Law is a blunt instrument. It's not a scalpel. It's a club. If there is something you consider indefensible, and there is something you consider defensible, and the same laws can take them both out, you are going to find yourself defending the indefensible.

I think we have to accept a number of things these days in the west:

1. The law is a blunt instrument;
2. Your computer is hacked and everything on it is viewable;
3. There are people who would love to see you put away;
4. There is zero percentage, not only in having questionable material on board but in having any material of a female nature;
5. Feminism has a lot to answer for in bashing the male;
6. One must make no reference whatsoever to the allure of the female.

This blog decided long ago to say bollocks to the last point for a single reason - it's sheer hypocrisy to maintain that line. For a male to say that an alluring woman is not alluring tells me he has something to hide and it just further fuels the paranoia which has seen families looking askance at the father, where fathers feel they can't go near their children without inviting suspicion and where kids grow up in a paranoid atmosphere.

I don't know about you but it looks pretty clear to me, from the manner, the pre-occupations, the degree of secretiveness, when there might be a problem. Like alcoholism, there are clearly degrees. If a kid climbs up on Dad's lap, that seems to me a far cry from a kid climbing up onto Dad's lap with Dad having a conduit to real kiddy porn on his computer, even "artistic stuff". If it comes to it, even having a vast supply of ordinary porn would be a concern of mine.

Anyone who says he or she has never viewed the standard pap freely available on the net looks to be a liar, in my eyes. Hell, you can't google anything these days without something appearing on the first page. But I think you'd agree there is that and then there is the fixation with and the storage of enormous numbers of images and the two are quite different.

It would be naive to deny there is a problem out there of silent domestic abuse which can go on for decades. Ironically, it is my closeness to many females and what they've told me over the years which convinces me that the thing is quite widespread, to the point where, if she is halfway attractive, there might have been at least something questionable happen to her in her early years.

Trouble is, in the current climate, where any contact of any kind equals abuse, the female is encouraged to interpret something, which might have had innocent antecedents, into a case of domestic abuse.

I can give examples from my own childhood. When I was about 11 or 12, I apparently went into some phase where I became attractive to the adult male and there were encounters with a number of family friends and neighbours. Thankfully I seemed to lose that attractiveness in late teenage.

There was one incident where we did a Boy Scout thing and to answer the unasked question - yes there was boy-on-boy buggery on those scout camps. Anyway, we went round to neighbours and did a job for some money. One neighbour constructed a situation where I sat beside him and he showed me how to mend some shed tool or whatever. Now I know exactly when he crossed the line. It wasn't when his hand rested on my thigh. It was when it came close to my groin.

I never let him get any further but I sure as hell never went back there again and that made me one of the lucky ones. If my father had known, half the neighbours would probably be dead by now.

Seems to me though that this is straying from the point - the point being the domestic stuff. I think the current paranoia is sick and reflects the sick western society today, for which the feminists must shoulder their share of the blame [which they never would, of course]. The average father would no more touch his child than cut off his own goolies but in not being able to have contact with his child in a normal way, the child starts getting paranoid at the withholding of love and that is a major danger in this day and age.

Yes, the genuine cases need addressing and the system should not be stacked against the child but at the same time, we have to be more than suspicious about the hysteria as well and the automatic assumption that the male is guilty, especially when that is fuelled by a man-hating female. Minette Marin wrote on this in her piece on misandry:

My daughter's attitude was just a watered-down classroom version of the hard-line feminist view that all men are rapists. Of course it is not difficult to understand misandry. But it would be a tragic mistake to be as unjust to men as they have traditionally been to us.

Yet that is what women seem constantly tempted to do.

In the debate on date-rape there seems, on the part of the most vociferous women, to be a wilful indifference towards men. They seem interested only in female sexuality and perspectives, and to discuss these things in a way that is clearly quite incomprehensible to most men.

Last year Cosmopolitan reported that hundreds of women wrote in to say that until they read the magazine's article on date-rape, they had not realised they had been raped.

Obviously this is the extreme position and there are definitely clear cut rapes and I don't wish to buy into this. What I do want to buy into is the paranoia and hysteria which now governs relations between the sexes.

Yesterday, I was at my hairdresser [don't laugh or I'll call you a Hairist] and I made the comment to the girl doing my scone that many women seem to feel the cold more than men and she shot back: "That's a bit sexist, isn't it?"

I asked why, she thought about it and then said; "Maybe we do feel the cold more."