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“Last Activity: 05-23-2003 08:35 PM”
Nope, they probably aren’t going to notice.
Doe it depend on the age of the poster, too?
I remember seeing NAMBLA mentioned in the news from time to time in the last 2 decades. My impression was that the guy(s) behind it (so to speak) were compulsive trouble makers who revelled in the publicity of spouting a socially provocative and contrarian cause, much like, say, neo-nazis.
Child abuse is a common and long-standing problem. I recall something published IIRC by Jeffrey Masson, who did authorized research in the Freud archives until he published his views and got the boot. His contention was that Freud in his early days as a psychiatric pioneer recognized that many of the messed-up women he was treating had problems due to childhood sexual molestation by adult family (or servants). However, he quickly figured out that accusing some of the top members of Vienna society of being child molestors was a career-limiting move, and the sexually-repressed society of the era did not want to talk about it. Hence he made up the whole Oedipus/Electra complex /childhood sex obsession bullshit and sent the psychiatric “profession” on a hundred year long wrong turn.
Equating homosexuality with abuse of boys is a long-standing gay-bashing tactic of the anti-gay lobby. I wonder, since I’m not gay, I don’t know, but…
Homosexuality I think appears to be tied to brain maps… we have parts of our brain that recognize “old, young, cute, healthy, sick, male, female” etc. The part of the brain that says “horny” would be tied to the recognizer of opposite sex; sometimes, for some unknown developmental reason, it is tied to a different part- i.e. in gay men, it is tied to the “man” recognizer. The difference is that a fertile “barely legal teen girl” looks a lot more like a desirable adult woman to a straight man, than (I assume) a teen boy does look like a desireable guy to a straight woman. Evolutionarily speaking, men are looking for young healthy breeding stock while women are looking for big strong hunters. Presumably, then, gay men have the same “recognizer” for what cranks their motor and their ideal would be a buff six-pack sporting twenty-something? Of course, both are still looking for long walks on the beach and quiet nights by the fire…
So while the Ashton Kutchner-Demi Moore type of connections receive heavy comment, the massive number of older man-younger woman situtations receive very little such notice, simply because they seem more “normal”.
If someone died when they were eight and have been a zombie for ten years, are they still underage?
Anyway, there used to be a lesbian pedophile site (now gone underground) called Butterfly Kisses, run by the International Female Girllovers Collective (IFGLC). If anything actually more reviled than NAMBLA.
[old fogey mode]
Nope. Once upon a time the Straight Dope Msg Board ran on ubb not vB. And for long-forgotten reasons an upgrade from ubb version something to ubb version something-plus-one made a difference in how posternames were stored; the later ubb version was backwards-compatible but a few years later when the vB transition took place, ONLY the later-version ubb-generated posts came over intact with the usernames properly retained; the yet-older ubb-version-whatever posts made back in the old old days came through as if posted by a Guest.
[/old fogey mode]
Did you make this crap up on your own, or are you relying on someone else’s misinformation?
Anyway . . .
I don’t know whether NAMBLA still exists, but I met 2 or 3 of their members briefly, back in the '80s. They did not cause even one little ping in my gaydar, which is usually very accurate. At no time did I get any impression that they were gay men. They just seemed like very, very strange straight guys with some bizarre ideas about adult/child dynamics. I felt quite uncomfortable being in the same room with them.
It was an unfortunate side effect back when I was a moderator that when the mods got really ticked off and took away your birthday, your name would disappear along with it. We actually got nasty letters from the I.R.S. because posters weren’t able to print or sign their names on various tax forms, so we got word From On High not to use that punishment any more.
My understanding is that the majority of child molesters are considered straight; that is, adult men who willingly engage in sexual acts with women as well as immature boys, girls, or both, but never adult men. Men who molest boys are a type of pedophile, not a type of homosexual.
Thank you for pointing that out. I think for many pedophiles who molest boys, it’s pretty much a preference of opportunity. There are situations where a man has access to boys more easily than girls, and guys like Jerry Sandusky gravitate toward those opportunities. I suspect that someone like Sandusky may come to terms with being a pedophile, but never with being gay (which he probably is not).
Seeing as this old zombie has been awaken, I have a somewhat OT question about this organization. Were they (are they) an organization operating outside the law, in the grey or clearly within the law?
Not knowing anything about NAMBLA, or whether they are active anymore - could someone sum up for me this: Do (did) they actively encourage pedophilic activities (as in, breaking the law) or did they merely argue that they felt the laws were wrong, and should be changed? If the latter, wouldn’t this be a fairly open and shut case of free speech, political process and all?
After all, if I’m not much mistaken, there is no law against being a pedophile? Or even expressing that you think your pedophile ways shouldn’t be banned under the law? The crime is acting on your pedophilia, and working to change that law cannot in itself be illegal?