Defenses of childhood sexuality and pedophilia hide in the damndest places. Take, for instance, French feminist thought. The stuff is often very obscure or abstract. But here and there is a dim light... Beauvoir slept with students and signed a petition calling for the abolition of the age of consent; Foucault was going to write a book on childhood sexuality and signed that same petition; leading up to the general strike in 1968 in France, Reich's La Lutte Sexuelle des Jeuenes (Sexual Struggle of the Youth) was widely read.

Or in leftist thought - Trotsky argued that the Russian Revolution could be judged by the freedom of youth. In Summerhill, the libertarian school in England, A.S. Neill wrote that he would have given teens birth control if it hadn't been for the fact that the government would have shut the school down. Anarchists and Trotskyists in the United States have written here and there a tiny bit in defense of teen (but not so much child) sexuality. Hell, there's even a report out by Human Rights Watch which accepts nearly every stupid assumption about sex offenders but argues that current punishments are unethical.

The places where I see this kind of pro-pedophilia or pro-child argument tend to be places where people are already challenging the way power is ordered and distributed. I think the reverse is also true. The oppression of children (and with it, pedophiles) is an important part of the glue that keeps uneven structures of power operating. The nuclear family is one of, if not the most, powerful structures for teaching people to be obedient to illegitimate authority. It is for this reason that I do not think the liberation of pedophiles or children could come about without a tremendous change in society. I realize this is obvious to many of you. I mention it only because I think that power is so terrible and so complex in our society that we are blind to most of it, and our liberation requires the dismantling of much of this power. Like all revolutionaries, we must develop broad knowledge and tactics.

I also realize that much of the above is not immediately useful and has already been discussed by others. True, we must develop broad tactics. But how does knowing this help? The handful of people on this forum are powerless; all we can do for now is subsist.

I saw a girl today. I don't have to describe her. What matters is what you have all felt. You're drawn, totally drawn, but you are also pushed back. And what pushes you back is not just the knowledge that you can't talk to her, flirt with her, get to know her, brush your hand against her cheek. What pushes back is the whole painful history of your own oppression. Your whole life pushes back. Each time you see a girl it's a reminder of your horrible curse, so it rips and tears at your chest and your stomach.

And that's where the above paragraphs are valuable. It's not because I have come up with some important scholarly discoveries or that I've come up with some important tactical ideas. There are better minds and more committed activists than me. It's because I can speak what I feel and what I think. You are, in fact, the only audience to which I can speak. You're like those glimpses of light in leftist literature, those tiny places where someone acknowledges a central part of what makes me, me.

So, thank you. I've been reading this board for years. I've only registered recently. I've posted next to never. But that you exist somehow makes me feel human. I don't expect the content of my posts to be valuable to anyone, but the mere fact of my posting continues this tradition which recognizes each of us as a legitimate person.