Alba’s article “What we pretend not to know about the sexual abuse of boys” is very interesting, but there are a few parts I find questionable that I would like to discuss further, which cause me to have reservations about uncritically sharing it as a primer on CSA of boys, including:
Ganymede, Gabriel Ferrier, 1874.
I think it says a lot about the status of children that for most of our history, the story of a God kidnapping a child and gifting horses to his parents as a consolation inspired artists as an example of ideal love or even spiritual elevation. This is because for most of our history, that’s what boys were: sexual objects. From Antiquity to the Renaissance, to the Victorian and Edwardian periods.
We stop at the artistic depictions of this objectification, and we say it cannot be condemned because they were different times. But we don’t dare to go further. We don’t like to talk about the rape of slave boys, apprentice boys, cabin boys, boys who studied in monasteries, boys who studied in boarding schools, so-called “delinquents” in reformatories. We close our eyes to it because Caravaggio’s art is pretty. No one cares that Da Vinci, among other men, raped Jacopo Saltarelli.
We don’t have histories of it that aren’t celebratory, histories that do not talk about how the objectification of boys in art is a perfectly human research for “ideal beauty” (the discourse of beauty has been oppressing boys since Ancient Greece, where men’s sexual predation was naturalized as the normal reaction one could have to a boy’s beauty), that do not define the boys assaulted by the men we called “great” as their lovers. We don’t even have histories that grant them personhood.
We may have the question of why this isn’t part of a feminist history, to seek their agency—as it has been done recently, even if in my humble layman’s opinion not without flaws, by Dr. Hope Cleves in her biography of author and sexual abuser Norman Douglas.
I’m honestly very confused by this take (the last sentence, I mean); I haven’t read Cleves’ book yet, but I have skimmed part of it and read various articles about and reviews of it, as well as a substantial amount of pro-c social media posts, forum posts, blog posts, and wiki articles (just search “Cleves” on Newgon, for example) on her and her book, many of which were laudatory (e.g. “Prue,” a prominent Newgon editor and feminism-skeptic/antifeminist who has written guest posts for Tom O’Carroll’s blog, loves to sing her praises and cite her/bring her up, thinks her book was great). I have also read about her and looked at other things she has written or said. Everything I have seen so far has indicated that it was apologia (couched as Actually Anti-CSA, or even More Anti-CSA Than Thou). It seems rather obvious to me that she is working from CSA-apologist/soft pro-c frameworks, her work ultimately serves CSA apologia, and it’s no coincidence that so many CSA apologists like it so much and find it heavily compatible with their views and advocacy, even if they have criticized the perfunctory disclaimers she added in to throw less aware activists off the scent.
It is a pattern among covert pro-c academics to write texts “humanizing” or bringing sympathy to CSA perpetrators (as if there aren’t already buckets of sympathy everywhere you go; what’s needed more is sympathy for and highlighting the narratives and lives and perspectives of the victims; remember that she wrote a biography of Norman Douglas, not a biography “of” the victims, with a title centering them or a cover other than an image of the Great Man taking up all the room and being Great yet again), arguing that CSA is less harmful or traumatic to victims than how society has allegedly overexaggerated (as if society doesn’t already claim we’re just overexaggerating and actually it’s not so harmful or devastating that’s silly just get over it), but then hedging and hastily reassuring the reader that they don’t actually support CSA, they still condemn it of course, entirely apart from their (misplaced) sympathy or (inaccurate and anti-survivor) downplaying of harm (the most infamous modern example being Rind et al.). Some anti-CSA activists, both liberal and radical, may at times fall for this charade, and even come to believe that that the crypto-pro-c’s view really is more radically anti-CSA than the usual because of how they present their claims as anti-establishment, and this confluence of trends fools the anti-c’s into conflating them.
“Agency” is a tricky question. “Seeking agency in subaltern histories” can be a positive, revolutionary thing, or it can be reactionary by serving DARVO and falsely ascribing more social agency to the oppressed victim than they actually had, thus failing to adequately acknowledge the effects of the oppression. (There are parallel debates on this topic in academia wrt other oppressions, such as racism.) (This is partly why I prefer to emphasize seeking/revealing the subjectivity of the oppressed in history, rather than agency.)
One would be remiss to forget how “but the children have agency!!” is also a common pro-c talking point and language pro-c’s use to claim that CSA is actually consensual, that the child isn’t being abused because they have the “agency” to just stop it whenever they want (with no other considerations about power imbalance or manipulation), that they’re on equal footing with the abusive adult, or even that they have more agency than the adult and are the real predator or real one exerting power-over in the relationship. When we discuss agency, as anti-c youth liberationists, we must take care to parse this accurately and argue for more (actual) agency for children in freeing from adultist constraints without overcorrecting into the reactionary idealist view. I do believe Alba agrees with me on this and does the latter when discussing agency, but I am also certain that Rachel Hope Cleves is doing the former.
The title is already a dead giveaway, IMO. One such as “Unspeakable: A Life beyond Sexual Morality” draws on classic tropes villainizing anti-c’s as irrationally or arbitrarily “moralistic,” puritanical, while pro-c’s are edgy, anti-moralist/having “no morals” (as an apparently good and not equally arbitrary thing), liberatory, counterculture—as if hegemonic (and Christian-supremacist) views of morality don’t already include CSA as “moral” and acceptable, which is what actually harms survivors. “Unspeakable” could be an honest reference to how hegemony silences anti-CSA speech when CSA has occurred. But let’s look at what she calls “unspeakable” in the book:
There is another pro-c discursive trend which likes to claim that it’s socially “unspeakable” to defend CSA, portray CSA as more “positive,” discuss “willing victims” or nice adult perpetrators, that society is so overwhelmingly anti-CSA and censorious of CSA-ambivalent or supportive speech and behavior, or even abusive, carceral toward it, that the environment is stifling, repressive, problematic. This conflates the sexual shaming and silencing imposed upon CSA survivors with supposed shaming and silencing of perpetrators. But the point about the “culture of silence” is that it’s victims who are silenced from saying it happened or saying that it wrong when it happened, from speaking for themselves. The same culture overvalues perpetrators and encourages them to speak from their perspective constantly, amplifies their voices, does not silence them at all. Thus it’s not that puritanical or silencing cultures entirely proscribe discussion of CSA, but that they relegate it to the private sphere for acceptable patriarchal right/exploitation or want it confined to elite intellectual discourses, and/or specifically silence counter-hegemonic oppositional discourses about it.
One other way the “unspeakable” trope is used is to claim that while many past historical figures, including luminaries or celebrities, people who “contributed” greatly to society/culture/history, and large swathes of the population were pro-CSA and/or CSA perpetrators, this is “silenced” or “censored” today in favor of people rehabilitating such figures, erasing that they did CSA, to uphold the anti-CSA view because “they were good and their opinion matters and should determine our opinion, so if they actually did a lot of CSA, then we would have to permit CSA too, but we don’t want to permit CSA so we pretend they didn’t do it,” while the pro-c’s are coming from the view that “they were good and their opinion matters and should determine our opinion, so if they actually did a lot of CSA, then we would have to permit CSA too, and they did, so we can permit it and do it ourselves today.” This conflates liberal “anti-CSA” PoVs with all anti-CSA PoVs. We, as leftists/anarchists, believe that yes they did, it was widespread and in fact is still widespread today (among the ruling classes), but that was and is bad and we want to smash the system of Great Man worship entirely.
There is one other place in the book where Cleves says the word “unspeakable.” In the following, she seems to hint at this trope (co-opting and twisting our legitimate discourse about hegemony and anti- deviance-scapegoating), though she shies away from following through and hedges by claiming that she isn’t actually making a positive moral judgment when saying [CSA] was normal:
What part of “children’s ordinary experiences" (supposedly) is she referring to here, though? Let’s take a look at the next paragraphs:
She is not saying it in an anti-CSA/anti-c way at all. (Though she of course sneakily conflates general anti-child-sexuality puritanical adultism (which would include individual sexual feelings and consensual peer sexual activity) with adult-child sex/CSA using (I would argue deliberately) vague, ambiguous language. But obviously, looking at the context of the prior paragraph, it clearly cannot be construed as anything but a reference to actual CSA.)
Given the context, just looking at the book summary, these phrases and sentences give off red flags to me:
Cleves exemplifies the “witch-hunt narrative” in this paragraph:
(The familiar DARVO/anti-cancel-culture/anti-SJW talking points, of course.)
Her introduction, meanwhile, is a veritable who’s who of academic CSA apologists:
(implying that queer activists’ repudiation of CSA was/is assimilationist, implying that opposing CSA is hegemonic and socially favored, rather than consistent with queer-liberationist anti-patriarchal values, an opposition to oppression, with queer children being disproportionately oppressed by CSA because of queerphobia; also a popular pro-c movement talking point.)
Steven Angelides? The notorious open CSA supporter and advocate? Really??
Taking antifeminist potshots at feminist anti-patriarchal analysis of CSA as oppression could not possibly be radical, liberatory, or meaningfully feminist or anti-CSA.
What exactly did that article and that book say? And what exactly where the criticisms?
You can read the cited articles and books for yourself. Some of them explicitly, unapologetically argue in favor of CSA, not just in the soft-apologist entryist way.
Absolutely no self-respecting actually-anti-c person would ever cite these people positively to make their point.
I also want to note that there is a 2021-2 series of four dubious articles on the NOTCHES blog about Unspeakable, including one by Cleves, that really toe the line with soft-apologist CSA-survivor-hostile talking points. That was several years after Sarah Schulman (a notorious serial abuser and extremely influential abuse advocate/apologist) had published a 2017 thinkpiece on NOTCHES defending Milo Yiannopoulos, NAMBLA, and Catholic Church CSA, and portraying child rape and pederasty as queer, counterculture forces rather than hegemonic, chastising anti-c opponents as puritanical. That entire website seems to be run and populated by a clique of almost entirely white, cis, middle- and upper-class queer or queer-theorist academics who want to take edgy, counterculture positions on sexuality and covertly defend CSA and normalize this/pass this under the radar, without being called out by principled leftists, performatively showing a (very selective) portrayal of themselves as radical, anti-racist, pro-trans, etc. as a shield to hide behind. I don’t want to do a total “guilt by association” thing, but I think if one were a principled anti-CSA individual one might have reservations publishing content about CSA in a (multiple instances) known and proven pro-CSA/CSA-apologist blog which continued to allow for pro-CSA pieces to remain. Those articles reminded me of the 2017 when I saw them, and I’ve been in this discourse long enough to recognize when something is amiss or a red flag. I don’t trust anyone with such a profile.
You can also read about other articles she has written, and what others have said about them. Or watch an interview in which she rejects calling pederasty abuse or survivors survivors and discusses Norman Douglas’s CSA positively/with an apologist tone (the latter exposé, in a Twitter thread by a rightwing account, is framed problematically; I obviously condemn the queerphobia and other reactionary language it employs and critique CSA culture and perpetrators decoupled from such terminology and frameworks, but it’s the easiest source I could find from a quick search).
The “flaws” of her work aren’t just random, mild, excusable flaws; they are core to her entire premise and they show up in nearly every part of what she writes and says. We can do much, much better than this. Many actual feminists, queer liberationists, and youth liberationists have already written about CSA of boys in much more insightful ways.
I think non-academics are in many ways positioned to analyze better than formal academics, not the other way around, because academia is still fundamentally a bourgeois institution invested in the reproduction of capitalism and ruling-class values and the gatekeeping of legitimized knowledge production from the economically and otherwise marginalized. Resistance to academic privilege/hegemony has always been a central part of the struggles of the subaltern. We shouldn’t be nervous about saying what we think and claiming an authoritative position on a subject that is personal to us or which we have thought and researched extensively about just because we’re “humble laymen.” So many academics and so much of academia is pro-c/CSA-apologist; academia is a key front in moving forward the pro-c movement. I’ve gotten so much harassment flung my way because I’m a minor, not college-educated yet, not Officially Licensed by an expensive fancy degree to talk about CSA as if I’m actually right (the audacity!); academically-oriented pro-c’s who have berated and insulted me for speaking up and have been dismissive of my work put me down in a distinctly ageist, ableist, capitalist, know-your-place way; to them, we in our little corner of the Internet are known as those hysterical crazy SJWs who complain about/criticize academia and academics constantly to promote our anti-c agenda—and we’re right! I’m sick and tired of being afraid of criticizing someone/something just because they’re considered Great or Canonical in some way, sick and tired of being pressured to tolerate crypto-CSA-apologia while they gaslight us into thinking we’re overreacting. These people have no idea what the fuck they’re talking about and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise.
(I had initially planned to present comprehensive receipts/all of the things discussing Cleves I’d initially read which I took issue with and dissect more parts of the above referenced content in more depth, but I don’t have the spoons to gather all that now, though if my specific point-by-point analyses of pro-c’s-writing-about-Cleves or of her other articles are needed then I might add them later. I do plan on reading the whole book sometime to understand more about what to critique and I’m sure I would have much more to say with that, but I’m not sure if I would post that here, on fediverse, or in my private study group. If anyone has more to say or would like me to discuss this more, please feel free to add on.)
