|
So, does anyone agree with the ideas the author presents in his book chapter? Does anyone one appreciate that I posted it? Does anyone anything? M. SOURCE: BOOK CHAPTER from: "The Erotic Minorities: The book that shocked Sweden and France" by Lars Ullerstam Grove press, New York 1966 DOWNLOAD: https://annas-archive.li/search?index=&page=1&sort=&display=&q=The+erotic+minorities+Lars+Ullerstam BOOK BACK COVER BLURB: A revolutionary work "The Erotic Minorities" is a humane and eloquent plea to accept as full-fledged human beings the “sexually different’ — the voyeurs, exhibitionists, the so-called sadists or masochists, the scopophiliacs (Peeping Toms), and all the others whose behavior is usually considered as “perverted”. To help abolish the misconceptions and prejudices about deviant persons, Dr. Ullerstam offers many facts and examples of sexual minority patterns and challenges many of our deep-rooted taboos. Even those who may not agree with the ideas expressed in this book will read the author’s persuasive and witty arguments with fascination. “Dr. Ullerstam’s basic premise deserves serious consideration: why should not those who ‘deviate’ from the sexual norm (in the statistical sense) be permitted their gratification, if it involves equals and is freely chosen?” — Playboy “Dr. Ullerstam's views are well-thought-out and persuasively presented and they deserve a careful hearing by all thinking people.” —Albert Ellis, Ph.D. CONTENTS: Introduction Preface Pleasure, need, and taboo Puritans in a welfare society Urge pattern, perversion, and sex criminals Incest Exhibitionism Pedophilia Saliromania Algolagnia Homosexuality Scopophilia 104 Other sexual deviations 110 The sex laws 124 The pornography laws 131 Sexual reforms 148 Puritanical counter-arguments All that ye wish 161 Glossary 165 Laws of the United States 170 --------- Pedophilia Our bigoted and ill-considered attitude to sexual matters hardly ever achieves a riper expression than when the subject is infantile sexuality and “dirty old men.” The Victorians believed that the main task of education was to alienate the child from anything connected with sex. In this way, they believed, the rising generation was saved from a life of vice and disease. By now, this attitude has faded a little, but there still are many young parents who feel they have to react with disgust and nausea when the child expresses sexual curiosity. The child psychiatrists are preaching to deaf ears. People believe themselves receptive to the psychiatrists’ advice, but as soon as it begins to deal with unpleasant subjects, they dig their heads into the sand like ostrich. It was his theory on infantile sexuality that caused the greatest uproar about Freud’s doctrines. We are still stuck with the Christian myth that children are innocent and pure. There is hardly one other culture known in which infantile sexuality would have been hedged in by as many taboos as in our society. In many other cultures the children are initiated into sexual secrets from the very beginning, and their erotic games are encouraged. On the Samoan Islands, Margaret Mead relates, the mothers used to masturbate their boys, so that their genitals would grow to the right size. The ancient Greeks went so far as to consider it an older man’s duty to establish erotic relations with boys, and saw it as an essential prerequisite for their education to good citizenship. For a long time, our culture has considered it right for adults to ‘implant guilt feelings in their children by frightening them away from masturbation. No one ever thinks of prosecuting parents for creating this terror of sex in “young vulnerable minds"—for making them become sexually inhibited invalids. But should loving genital manipulations occur between a child and an old man, we feel we have to call for the police, although anyone who takes an interest in child psychiatry should know that such behavior, generally speaking, does not harm the child in the least, rather the opposite being the case. Children have a craving for physical contact, and if they do not get it at home, they resort to outsiders. Now this should not be misinterpreted to mean that I claim all grown men ought to be allowed to manipulate children’s genitals. My chosen task is to plead for a more reasonable sense of proportion in our attitude to this problem. Pedophilia (from pais, child; and philos, loving) means that the person so afflicted feels sexually attracted to children. This inclination must be very common, but we are not allowed to admit it to ourselves or to others. With some people, sexuality has become totally fixed on children, so that these are the only conceivable objects for their urge. For these, life is a single, long period of abstinence, if they do not want to break the criminal law. The only pedophiliacs we have any certain knowledge of are the criminal child molesters. It is often difficult to glean any facts from the scientific literature dealing with the subject, as the authors are in a state of moral indignation and tend to interlard their factual expositions with invective. Reinhardt* claims for instance that the pedophiliacs are extremely dangerous, not only because there are sadistic rapists and murderers among them, but also because they have a natural tendency to cruelty and ruin the children’s morals, even in those cases when they do not cause them any physical damage. The “dirty old men” are a very heterogeneous group. Usually a distinction is made between those whose urge is specifically directed toward children, and those who resort to children when they lack other sexual objects. Both un-inhibited and overinhibited individuals are represented, with all conceivable gradations in between. The secondarily de-inhibited senile individuals are a special, and tragic, subcategory. Many of these are infantilistic to a marked degree and enjoy playing with children most of all; thus it is not so surprising that they also look for their sexual objects in their natural social environment. There are others who have in their time attempted to establish sexual contacts with adult women, but who have been frustrated and have not repeated the attempt. In how many cases does the child molester use force or threats to achieve his objective? The statistics give highly divergent data, but most investigators agree that in more than half the cases no violence has been used. The old ones practically never resort to brutality. Intercourse occurs in a minority of cases, reciprocal manipula- * James Melvin Reinhardt, Sex Perversions and Sex Crimes, C. C. Thomas, 1957. tion of genitals is far more common. Girls appear as objects somewhat more often than boys. The most desired age group is that between five and nine. The child psychiatrist Elsa-Brita Nordlund has made a study of about one hundred sexual offenses against children, committed between the years 1944 and 1949 (SOU 1953: 14). Among other things, she demonstrates that the number of frequent contacts is twice as high as that of isolated cases. The child often appears strikingly loyal to the offender. This corroborates what can be indirectly gathered from the existing case material. Many pedophiliacs are remarkably gentle and peaceful individuals, the kind that would not hurt a fly. They often establish intimate relationships with recurring sexual contacts. The child gets lollipops and a physical tenderness it has lacked in its home environment. Elsa-Brita Nordlund relates an illuminating episode, which reveals the affection children can feel for their “dirty old men.” At a police line-up a child was asked to point out an offender, from among several arrested, and pointed at the policeman, because he was so “nice.” The psychiatrist Bo Gerle (Psychiatric Views on the Sexual Offenses, SOU 1958:14) characterizes the aged pedophiliacs in the following manner: Child molesters are punished very severely in Sweden. They can be sentenced to hard labor for two to eight years, if they are not declared non compos mentis and incarcerated in an institution for an unspecified period of time. In the new penal code the penalties are a little less severe, though not essentially mitigated. What, then, is the good of such draconic punishment? There are many pedophiliacs who are guilty of violating children, there even are murderers among them. But is it reasonable to punish people who express their love for children simply because other individuals treat children brutally? Two motivations for a generalized criminalization of acts of pedophilia are usually given: one of them is based on mental hygiene, the other on legal policy against crime. The mental-hygienic motivation is that children suffer from sexual interference, whether violence comes into it or not. This is an arguable claim. A Norwegian physician, Rasmussen, has made a study of fifty-four women, who had all been “interfered with by dirty old men” in their childhood. Forty-four of them exhibited no psychical disturbances whatsoever. I admit that I don’t know the criteria for psychical disturbances that were used in these cases, but I do find that the group as a whole seems remarkably sound, even when compared to a normal sample. Elsa-Brita Nordlund, on the other hand, thinks that she has evidence for emotionally damaging effects. She does not, however, believe that the sexual approach in itself has had any pathogenetic effect worth mentioning, provided that the offender did not use force. No: what traumatised the child, in her experience, is the mother’s bigoted and hysterical reaction. Anna-Lisa Annell, an assistant university professor, shares this view. It is a priori credible that children can suffer mental damage from a “dirty old man’s” advances if they have already been inoculated with a horror of sex by their parents. But if that is the case, surely the parents have been more pathogenetic than the “dirty old man.” From the point of view of mental hygiene the problem is best solved if the parents show some common sense. The motivation based on crime policy cannot be dismissed so easily. Its argumentation runs as follows. Among the child molesters there are quite a number of violent individuals, some of whom are really hard cases. It is of course necessary to have a law to protect the children from these. By incarcerating all “dirty old men” for a number of years, one does cut down the number of those who live in freedom, and this, in turn, diminishes the probability of violent molestations of children. Thus the most effective protection would consist of having all pedophiliacs imprisoned for life. Humanitarian considerations make this draconic measure impossible. A more differentiated treatment of these offenders cannot be achieved, as legal psychiatry has not yet developed to the stage where it can separate the wheat from the chaff. There is no way of knowing which pedophiliacs are potentially dangerous. And therefore there is no other choice but to accord them all equal treatment, even if this may seem unnecessarily cruel in certain cases. I suppose there are not too many obviously weak links in this chain of reasoning. But I would like to draw attention to a special category of “dirty old men”: the pedophiliac old men. Of these, we know that they are practically never guilty of violence; they almost always treat the child with kindness and care. Would it require more than a little good will to humanize the treatment of these, in most cases, morally respectable persons, so that they would not have to end their lives in tragedy? It is regrettable that there is no way to supply the pedophiliacs with the objects of their sexual desire, but I do not know how this could be arranged in practice. But I oppose the view that it is an a priori fact that these individuals should not be allowed to satisfy their sexual urge. The sexual deprivation of the “dirty old men” is a problem to be solved by tomorrow's humanly oriented society. END pp68-74 [@nonymouse] [Guardster] [Proxify] [Anonymisierungsdienst] |