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Joe Canimal's avatar

Auden and Steve Spender used to hie to Morocco to bugger 11 year old subalterns. We all know what Focault did. Etc. Etc. Raping vulnerable young males is part of how homosexuals reproduce. And the Velvet Mafia is a paramount force in any subset of academia—the narcissism and psychopath and cluqueishness naturally lend themselves to political infighting.

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Alec Gibbs's avatar

Strictly speaking, there are collateral consequences to conviction as we lawyers call them. The sex offender registry and the attendant restrictions on offender proximity to certain areas where children congregate is one, DNA collection following a felony conviction is another; additionally, denial of access to certain federal benefits for certain drug crimes or lifelong prohibitions on firearm possession for certain convicts, and so on. An especially harsh consequence is revocation of immigration status following conviction of certain crimes. The legal fiction is that these are regulatory policies that are not intended to be punitive, though in the case of sexual offenses nearly every restriction is in practice a concession to feminists and social conservatives, while the civil consequences of DUI convictions owe more to a desire for revenue on the part of the state and insurers as well as the lack of opposition to prosecutor and Mothers Against Drunk Driving lobbyists.

I oppose these except for certain habitual offenders for a few reasons. First, you do the crime and serve the time, and that should be that. Second, the criminal justice system in the States is a joke that is fueled by racial and class animus. Third, the effect of having a large pool of felon convicts with records that weigh on them for life is the creation of a plentiful and cheap labor pool that drives down wages for all workers.

With respect to the underlying offense involving involuntary pederasty, that is a fairly gruesome offense although there are far worse. Working in the field of sex offenses makes you jaded pretty easily, since we are talking about men (and it is overwhelmingly men, although female sexual predators are a fascinating lot for a lot of reasons) who have either truly deviant tastes (prepubescent to early pubescent) or who have tastes that are historically within the realm of what we deemed normal. I am enough of a social constructionist that I think those things change over time, although I would say that historically going into prepubescence was *always* considered deviant. But when it comes to men having a sexual interest in teenage boys or girls? A supervisor once told me that a man who denied he found any 16 year old girls was either lying or was looking at the teen boys. I don't really agree; teenage boys lack the fully developed secondary sexual characteristics that a lot of gay or bisexual men find attractive, and ditto sometimes for teenage girls and heterosexual males, which is also one of the reasons that the distinction of sexual orientation along both sex and age axes is theoretically useful, even though we have to pretend it doesn't exist because we invented the idea of a high sexual age of consent around the same time we invented childhood for the purpose of prohibiting exploitation of child labor.

Best book I have read on this is Philip Jenkins' Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America. Jenkins is a social conservative which is not my cup of tea, but he has a historian's disdain for modern America's obnoxious pearl clutching on this topic. The patriarchal norm was that men had sexual access to teenage girls and teenage boys, and you see this in virtually every traditional society in some form or another. It is modernity that banished these vices in the name of liberalism and humanism.

Anyway, I wouldn't hire him if only for liability purposes but in Europe I doubt that the sexual offender registries are as much of a barrier. But this is much more a European thing. There are still plenty of people in France that defend certain intelligentsia who more or less admit to having done this regularly. Despite what the obnoxious commenter here wrote, this is not a homosexual reproductive strategy. There's a reason Roman Polanski lives in Europe and not the States.

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