#b4u-act

The academic who recently resigned from a charity that promotes the medical transitioning of children had for years been writing blog entries related to pro-pedophilia activism and “minor attraction.”

Jacob Breslow, an Associate Professor at the London School of Economics, stepped down from his position as a trustee for UK-based trans activist organization Mermaids earlier this week after it was revealed that he had, on several occasions, made statements and published academic work that favorably portrayed pedophilia.

In 2011, Breslow, then a PhD student, spoke at a symposium titled “Pedophilia, Minor-Attracted Persons, and the DSM: Issues and Controversies,” hosted by pedophile advocacy organization B4U-Act. The stated purpose of the symposium was to lobby the American Psychiatric Association for changes to the diagnostic definition of pedophilia in order to “reduce stigma” against “minor-attracted people” (MAPs).

Breslow’s presentation was titled Sexual Alignment: Critiquing Sexual Orientation, The Pedophile, and the DSM V. In the lecture, Breslow promotes the concept of treating pedophilia as a sexual orientation, a goal long-advocated by B4U-Act. 

B4U-Act describes itself as an organization that works toward a “collaborative effort between minor-attracted people and mental health professionals,” and has a history of lobbying medical authorities for changes in criteria which would declassify pedophilia as a disorder. 

Founded in 2009 by convicted child rapist Michael Melsheimer, B4U-Act had apparently been approved by the founders of infamous pederast activist group, the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA). After B4U-Act’s creation, Melsheimer had informed other pedophiles that his organization’s approach would be focused around garnering public support for normalizing pedophilia by falsely claiming the intention was to prevent child sexual abuse.

At their symposium, Breslow read from a paper in which he rejected the understanding of pedophilic attraction to children as being inherently harmful, and supported the concept of pedophilia being classified as a sexual or political orientation.

“Allowing for a form of non-diagnosable minor attraction is exciting, as it potentially creates a sexual or political identity by which activists, scholars, and clinicians can begin to better understand Minor Attracted Persons … Many tend to begin with the linkage of pedophilic desire to harmful and abusive relationships and acts, and end up proliferating, rather than questioning, normative gendered and sexual intelligibility,” read Breslow’s abstract.

At the organization’s 2011 symposium, Breslow compared molesting a child to masturbating on a shoe, saying, “Just as the desire to and the act of cumming on a shoe requires a rethinking of the shoe … I want to now argue that the desire to and the act of cumming on or possibly with a child requires a rethinking of both the child and of the person for whom the child is a sexual fantasy or partner.”

Following news of Breslow’s pedophilia apologism, further damning revelations have come to light, with a feminist Twitter user exposing WordPress blog entries written by Breslow from 2009 to 2017. Twitter user @Scottish_Woman first drew attention to the old blog, providing evidence that Breslow’s sordid history with pedophile sympathizing was far longer than previously thought.

Many entries by Breslow advocate for reframing pedophilia as a sexual identity comparable to homosexuality. 

Breslow’s blog also provides links to external sites that contain or discuss child sexual abuse materials, such as a Wikipedia list of erotic books or pornographic publications, as well as the personal site belonging to a man claiming to be a convicted sex offender. 

In several blog posts, Breslow describes his fascination with and appreciation for pornographic magazines centered on the sexualization of teenage boys. In particular, Breslow praises Destroyer Magazine, a publication created by Karl Andersson which features sexualized photos of models that are advertised as being as young as 15 years old.

Breslow describes Destroyer as “a magazine dedicated to the beauty of the boy” and praises Andersson’s “academic(ish) critique and aesthetic appreciation of boyhood, deviance, and the LGBT community.”

Andersson came under widespread scrutiny in August after it was revealed he had written an academic article in which he admitted to masturbating to fantasy child sexual abuse material for three months as part of his “research” as a PhD student at the University of Manchester. Following media coverage of Andersson’s paper, he was suspended by university administrators.

Andersson’s article, titled “Using masturbation as an ethnographic method in research on shotasubculture in Japan” was roundly condemned by academics, parents’ groups and MPs. The academic journal Qualitative Researchpulled the article last month in response to the backlash, and the paper sparked a police investigation into whether Andersson had 

used illegal pornographic materials while residing in the UK.

From 2006 to 2010, Andersson was responsible for two unsettling visual media projects which focused on the sexualization of young boys: the aforementioned Destroyer, as well as Breaking Boy News.

While Destroyer was condemned both in Sweden and abroad for its disturbing content, Andersson was sympathetically covered by Out, an international gay news outlet, in 2012.

“The most controversial expression of homosexuality is when a man is attracted to an adolescent boy,” Andersson is quoted as saying, “The [porn films] that are called ‘barely legal’ feature men dressed as boys … I find it quite uninteresting. It’s just drag. The models in Destroyer are well under 18.”

The official site for Destroyer was recommended and linked through by Breslow, in addition to a pro-pedophile forum called Milkboys, which had hosted similar pornographic content of young boys at the time and boasted over 24,000 members. The administrator of the forum was interviewed by Andersson for an issue of Destroyer.

On his blog, Breslow also featured a pro-pedophilia quote from Jim Kepner, a gay rights activist, journalist, and founder of the International Gay and Lesbian Archives. 

“The Moral Majority’s pretense of protecting children is mostly a smokescreen. They are less concerned with protecting children than with maintaining their property right in children, with preventing children’s self-determination. While not every child may seek erotic relations with older persons, still, youth liberation is the natural ally of the defense of love between men and boys,” Breslow’s post reads.

To this day, Kepner is profiled positively on the official website of the North American Man / Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), which describes how, at a 1986 conference, Kepner referred to pedophiles as minorities and “victims themselves of prejudice and discrimination.”

In an early entry, Breslow compared his interest in certain types of underwear as a “feminist intervention,” and claimed that his sexual proclivity for “infantilism” and “submission” facilitates a “childish sexuality.”

“I recognize that calling upon a fetish to spark a rethinking of gender roles might seem trivial. However … As a marker of infertility, asexuality and submission, briefs as a sexual object make men’s desire/sexuality equivalent with the sexuality of a child. I hope to legitimate the re-sexualization of youth in a way that complicates current forms of gender and sexuality,” Breslow wrote in 2009.

Significantly, Breslow confessed to having sexual fantasies about children in his now-defunct WordPress blog. 

“I am constantly struggling not because of my ‘homosexuality’ or because my ‘gayness’ is so repressed, but because of my sexuality as deviant … it isn’t the gender of my sexual object choice that is the sole basis of my desire, but the age and subsequent deviance of that desire that is important,” Breslow wrote.

“I am attempting to work through the ways in which acts and identities gain meaning and become conflated. Although I obviously do not condone abuse, rape, molestation and intimate partner violence, I find the immediate connection between the sexual desire for youth and its pathologization, internalization and criminalization to be problematic,” Breslow wrote in 2011.

Over the course of the past decade, Breslow has maintained his views, as evidenced by his 2016 PhD thesis, in which he argued some kids are “queer.” 

In his paper The Theory and Practice of Childhood: Interrogating Childhood as a Technology of Power, Breslow quotes Judith Levine, an academic who authored a book arguing for the lowering of the age of consent to 12 years old, and has stated that “sex is not in in itself harmful to minors.”

In his thesis, Breslow also implies that children are not only sexual, but “perverse,” writing: “the queering that ‘queer’ does to the child, is one of resisting the child’s alleged asexuality and heterosexuality; allowing for the child’s pleasures, desires, and perversities.”

In 2021, Breslow published a book titled “Ambivalent Childhoods: Speculative Futures and the Psychic Life of the Child.” He described the book as exploring “the queer life of children’s desires.” One chapter, titled “Desiring the Child,” opens with a description of a 12-year-old child dancing and mimicking sex acts to a crowd of adults.

During an online book launch discussion, Breslow stated:“What do we do when queerness is aligned with projects that are less easy to sit with that are less sort of respectable? … Is it really that children or young people having sex is the problem? Or is it [the problem] the conditions under which that sex happens?” Breslow also condemned the “carceral state” for its treatment of sex offenders, and echoed previous work he has done rejecting the need for the sex offender registry.

News of Breslow’s position as a trustee at UK-based transgender youth charity Mermaids prompted widespread backlash this week, with many on social media calling for a public inquiry into the organization. 

Renowned author J.K. Rowling denounced “genderists” who belittled the significance of Breslow’s appointment to children’s charity Mermaids, which promotes the medical halting of puberty.

“The problem isn’t that a man who wrote sympathetically about orgasming ‘on or with’ a child was made trustee of a children’s charity, but that the TERFs might ‘twist’ his appointment. Then straight back to the self-soothing mantras, with a glow of inner virtue,” Rowling tweeted.

Breslow has published articles and presented lectures on strategies for undermining arguments made by critics of gender identity ideology. In January, he spoke for Cambridge University’s Centre for Gender Studies during an online event titled “‘Sex is Real,’ and other Gender Critical Non Sequiturs: A TERF Grammar Book.”

An organization established by Professor Sally Hines at the University of Leeds published an essay last year by Breslow which compared feminists to Nazis, and called for “a sustained campaign of resistance against them.” 

Last week, the Charity Commission, regulatory body for charities in England and Wales, announced it had opened an investigation into Mermaids in response to safeguarding concerns. A report by The Telegraph found that the organization was offering to secretly send potentially harmful breast binders to children without their parents’ knowledge or consent.

A spokesman for the commission said: “Concerns have been raised with us about Mermaids’ approach to safeguarding young people. We have opened a regulatory compliance case and have written to the trustees. We now await their reply.”

On October 6, The Times reported that the national lottery had decided to pause its £500,000 annual grant to Mermaids pending the results of the Charity Commission investigation.

Mermaids has stated they were ignorant of Breslow’s appearance at the B4U-Act conference prior to being approached by media, but it is unclear as to whether they were aware of his extensive academic history promoting the sexualization of children.