I object to the statement “most pedophiles are homosexual” for two reasons:
(1) I haven’t seen definitive evidence that pedophiles, as a group, molest same sex victims more often. The customs of Catholicism allow priests better access to boys than to girls, so it could simply be a matter of opportunity.
(2) Even if that statement is true, and technically correct from a semantic standpoint, it has the dangerous potential to create the wrong impression in people’s minds.
To clarify what I mean, and to try to lay bare the inherent limitations of language to convey concepts, I’m going to invent two fanciful new words. Please bear with me.
A “Snarg” is an adult homosexual who we know has a history of having sex with other adults of the same gender.
A “Flarg” is an adult heterosexual who has a history of having sex with adults of the opposite gender.
Just because most pedophiles have same sex victims, doesn’t mean that the Snarg across the street is more likely to be a pedophile than the Flarg across the street! It shouldn’t be used as an excuse to deny Snargs the chance to be teachers, or to be boy scout leaders. But the statement at the top of my post could be maliciously used to unjustly discriminate against Snargs. Homosexual pedophiles should not be conflated with Snargs because they’re not the same thing, but I fear that they will be.
There are heterosexuals, homosexuals, and bisexuals. All these people are oriented to men or women (the terms refer to sexually mature human beings).
Pedophiles are oriented to children. While they may prefer one sex over the other, it is the immaturity of the human being in question that is necessary for erotic gratification, the genitalia is a minor detail.
There’s another category of child molester who is not actually oriented to children, but uses and exploits them sexually for a wide variety of reasons. This category is also more likely to be indiscriminate about the sex of the child.
Going back to the priests, these are either pedophiles who usually exploit boys because boys are much more available to them, or non-pedophiles who use and exploit children of either sex because they have no other secret outlet to use and again, boys catch the brunt because they are more available and easier than girls.
Sexual desire motivates sexual activity, not rape. The fact that rape is a sexual crime committed via the genitals and that the rapist experiences gratification does not make it motivated by sexual desire. Sexual desire motivates a person to do sexual things, but it takes a lot more than the most raging lust imaginable to motivate someone to use another person as an object via force or threat. There is a line that must be crossed within, and it isn’t sexual desire that pushes a man over it, because he’s going to be doing a lot more than “having sex”.
What do you think race is? People have different looking features, hair and skin color. So? What more than that do you believe is there?
Don’t confuse culture with race. Race is a fantasy, a labeling system for appearance that has no basis in anything other than appearance.
Oh, and one other thing about this “gratification from a person of the same sex = homosexual orientation, or bisexual orientation”: if that were true, then a WHOLE lot of men are WAY more gay than they think: pretty much every man in prison.
And that’s simply not true. Men and women both will turn to same sex partners when they are deprived of opposite sex partners and be gratified by the sex. It doesn’t mean they are gay. It means they are human beings, they are sexual, and they are adapting.
Pedophiles and non-pedophile child abusers aren’t in it for the genitals. They are in it for the gratification, and for the pedos it’s the immaturity they find gratifying, not the specific genitals, and for the non-pedos they are just turning vulnerable people into objects for their gratification, again, not about the genitals.
“Semantic”? Give me a friggin break. There was already enough dancing with "evolved. The word that you’re trying to dance around in that sentence is “factual”. So, you advocate quashing scientific fact because you’re afraid that people might get the wrong idea. How nice. :rolleyes:
Are you running for Commissioner of the PC Police.
As for your belief on what constitutes “homosexuals”, you’re merely displaying you’re own limited understanding.
The overwhelming majority of men in prison engage in sex with other men. Does that make them gay?
No, they’re just in an environment where women aren’t available and men are by nature horny creatures who, if they can’t have sex with women will do so with other men.
Similarly, men in many countries, such as Iran or Saudi Arabia have sex with other men at much higher rates than men in western countries.
Is that because that people in Saudi Arabia, Iran, or the Palestinian territories are more likely to be gay?
No, they just live in societies where unmarried women don’t have sex with unmarried men, or are at least extremely reluctant to do so because there are extremely serious taboos against doing so and the consequences of getting caught are severe.
That’s also why huge numbers of unmarried men in Afghanistan have sex with prepubescent boys. Afghanistan is a society where unmarried women don’t have sex because they know what the consequences are and people in Afghanistan believe that prepubescent boys are somewhat like women for reasons that should be readily apparent to all.
However, that doesn’t make the men gay any more than the fact that members of the Latin Kings are far more likely to have fucked other men than men working in hair salons makes them gay.
This is how the mental health profession defines it.
If you disagree with it get a degree in psychiatry and then endeavor to change the DSM-IV when they write the DSM-V (or whatever the next one is…I forget what number they are on).
This is a very distorted misrepresentation of what actually happened.
In the first place, Summers didn’t actually say what you report. What he did do was make a lot of poorly supported, over-definite assertions about the causes of gender disparities in science and engineering faculties, and some of them were embarrassingly stupid.
When it comes to jumping to conclusions, the guy is a human pogo stick.
It’s not that there’s anything wrong with pointing out that differentials in job expectations or in innate aptitude may account for a lot of gender imbalance in science faculties, or that studies of gender imbalance should take these factors into account. If that were really what Summers had said, nobody would have got mad at him.
But he made a lot of unjustifiably sweeping assumptions and backed them up with simplistic random anecdotes like the one about his toddler daughters referring to “baby trucks”. There’s a scientific study for you. :rolleyes:
The level of thinking in Summers’s remarks is what you’d expect from a community-television talk show host musing off the top of his head about what just “naturally stands to reason” in his personal view of the world, not a high-powered academic discussing an extremely complex issue of academic demographics at a scholarly conference. He deliberately and admittedly pulled intentionally “provocative” claims out of his ass in order to stir the shit among his audience, and he has nobody to blame but himself if people were pissed off by it.
However, it’s entirely untrue that the resulting level of pissed-offness amounted to “forcing” him to resign as Harvard’s president. He gave his silly lecture in January 2005, and took some flak for it in the following months but was never in danger of being actually kicked out or forced into resignation.
He then went on to do several other silly things, including shielding a faculty member who was a close personal friend who via a conflict of interest had let Harvard in for a very expensive lawsuit. Then he made some financial-derivative investment decisions, widely regarded as reckless, that lost the endowment a billion dollars or so.
In February 2006, over a year after he made the controversial speech you referred to, he announced his resignation effective at the end of that academic year. The idea that this was somehow caused by his expressing non-PC views on gender is ridiculous. But it’s a very useful fictional talking point for conservatives who like to pretend that liberals have some kind of tyrannical stranglehold on academic freedom in universities.
The belief that rapists are not motivated by sexual desire is a liberal dogma based on no scientific evidence. Now I admit getting scientific evidence would be difficult. The only way I can think of would be to ask convicted rapists why they did it. Many of these, especially if they were still in prison, might give the answer they thought was expected of them - that they were angry at women, that they wanted to assert their power, etc. Nevertheless, they get erections. They have orgasms.
For most men sex is the impulse of an appetite, rather than an expression of affection. If this was not true, prostitution would not exist.
In science there is a bias toward the simplest explanation. Saying that a rapist desires a woman he realizes he cannot seduce, so he rapes her is a simpler, and consequently more plausible explanation than any other.
I am not sure why liberals have made an issue of this, and why they get so angry when I dispute them on it. I suspect they feel that sex is good, but violence is bad. Realizing that rape is bad, they conclude that rape has nothing to do with sex.
This is why a discussion of racial claims is appropriate for this thread:
“most liberals feel the need to make statistical and rational arguments (even to the point of being grotesquely counterintuitive) to make their points.”
This claim was posted in the opening comment in this thread. The fact that most liberals do not want to even hear or read about high rates of black crime, and inferior black academic performance, and the fact that they angrily reject a biological explanation for these characteristics calls into question the claim.
Different racial groups differ as much and in the same way as sub species of various animal species, and different breeds of domestic animals. The average IQ for a black person in the United States is 85. The average for a white is 100. The average for an East Asian is 106. When whites adopt black babies, most of them have IQs below 100. When they adopt East Asians, most of them have IQs above 100. Head Start has been a failure.
Also, blacks in the United States have a crime rate that is about eight times the white crime rate. The crime rate for East Asians is about 75 percent the white crime rate. I have lived with poor Vietnamese war refugees, and blacks. There is a difference, believe me. I believe that difference is biological. The anger with which most liberals respond to a biological explanation tells me that they are not more rational and respectful of facts than conservatives, despite the claim made in the opening comment of this thread.
It exists to assist people who are identified in this society by the social construct of Black (African-American/Colored). Just because there is no scientific definition of race doesn’t mean the social classification doesn’t have real and lasting impact.
I was referring to your comments on Race not rape; however though I am not familiar with the current psychological/criminalogical views on Sexual Assault I doubt you have accurately framed them with the above quoted sentence.
[QUOTE=New Deal Democrat]
This is why a discussion of racial claims is appropriate for this thread:
“most liberals feel the need to make statistical and rational arguments (even to the point of being grotesquely counterintuitive) to make their points.”
This claim was posted in the opening comment in this thread.
[/QUOTE]
That link doesn’t once mention race; so why are you using it to argue your own private-voodoo-racial theories in this thread?
[QUOTE=New Deal Democrat]
The fact that most liberals do not want to even hear or read about high rates of black crime, and inferior black academic performance, and the fact that they angrily reject a biological explanation for these characteristics calls into question the claim.
[/QUOTE]
Perhaps your belief that “most liberals do not want to even hear or read about high rates of black crime, and inferior black academic performance” is due to the lack of trust people have for those who don’t feel the need to provide credible citations to the bigoted claims that they trot out?
Perhaps people (who you call “liberal”) are simply not as gullible in swallowing old prejudices and 18th century discredited raceology as trussed up and modern cutting edge raceology?
Maybe “the liberals” feel that the adherents of these views are not credible participants of debate, when they arrogantly hold themselves as the “truth tellers” and hijack totally unrelated topics to preach/advance their racialist screed.
Yes, I can see how these “liberals” would treat this debate as a thinly disguised ruse to trot out private hatreds and frustrations in a public form. Now I repeat: These are your claims (well…just some of them) where are your cites?
I’m not terrifically interested in America’s racial issues, although it might be amusing to watch New Deal Democrat try to defend his claims and prove his inferences about causes being biological and not economic or social or cultural to have some there there. I would, however, appreciate it if New Deal Democrat made another of his claims more clear. Specifically, this business regarding how conservatives don’t try to suppress scientific findings. If conservatives aren’t trying to suppress scientific results by attempting to ruin the careers of scientists whose findings aren’t what conservatives want to hear, what are they doing? Why do Republican spokesmen like Limbaugh and Hannity argue that the fact it’s cold in Washington today disproves claims regarding global temperature trends over decades?