Religion is a Mental Illness

“Concurrent with Queer Nation’s creation, feminist scholars began developing the foundations for queer theory, an academic framework for unhinging heteronormative notions of sexual and gender identities from within, and beyond, the academy (Butler, 1990; de Lauretis, 1991). Efforts on both activist and scholarly fronts have similarly imagined queer as another way to think of, through, and against identity. A queer subjectivity might constitute a “blurring” of identities (Goldman, 1996), or, as Michael Warner put it, being queer is being “at odds with straight culture” (2000, p. 38).

– ”Encyclopedia of Diversity and Social Justice”

Her 1984 essay "Thinking Sex" is widely regarded as a founding text of gay and lesbian studies, sexuality studies, and queer theory. She is an associate professor of anthropology and women's studies at the University of Michigan.

In May, the Chicago Tribune ran a lurid four-day series with three-inch headlines, which claimed to expose a national vice ring organized to lure young boys into prostitution and pornography.

Newspapers across the country ran similar stories, most of them worthy of the National Enquirer. By the end of May, a congressional investigation was underway. Within weeks, the federal government had enacted a sweeping bill against 'child pornography' and many of the states followed with bills of their own. These laws have reestablished restrictions on sexual materials that had been relaxed by some of the important Supreme Court decisions. For instance, the Court ruled that neither nudity nor sexual activity per se were obscene. But the child pornography laws define as obscene any depiction of minors who are nude or engaged in sexual activity. This means that photographs of naked children in anthropology textbooks and many of the ethnographic movies shown in college classes are technically illegal in several states. In fact, the instructors are liable to an additional felony charge for showing such images to each student under the age of 18. Although the Supreme Court has also ruled that it is a constitutional right it is a constitutional right to possess obscene material for private use, some child pornography laws prohibit even the private possession of any sexual material involving minors.

The laws produced by the child porn panic are ill-conceived and misdirected. They represent far-reaching alterations in the regulation of sexual behaviour and abrogate important sexual civil liberties.

But hardly anyone noticed as they swept through Congress and state legislatures. With the exception of the North American Man/Boy Love Association and American Civil Liberties Union, no one raised a peep of protest.

A new and even tougher federal child pornography bill has just reached House-Senate conference.It removes any requirement that prosecutors must prove that alleged child pornography was distributed for commercial sale. Once this bill becomes law, a person merely possessing a nude snapshot of a 17-year-old lover or friend may go to jail for fifteen years, and be fined $100,000. This bill passed the House 400 to 1.

The experiences of art photographer Jacqueline Livingston exemplify the climate created by the child porn panic. An assistant professor of photography at Cornell University, Livingston was fired in 1978 after exhibiting pictures of male nudes which included photographs of her seven-year-old son masturbating. Ms. Magazine, Chrysalis, and Art News all refused to run ads for Livingston's posters of male nudes. At one point, Kodak confiscated some of her film, and for several months, Livingston lived with the threat of prosecution under the child pornography laws. The Tompkins Country Department of Social Services investigated her fitness as a parent. Livingston's posters have been collected by the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan, and other major museums. But she has paid a high cost in harassment and anxiety for her efforts to capture on film the uncensored male body at different ages (Stambolian, 1980, 1983).

It is easy to see someone like Livingston as a victim of the child porn wars. It is harder for most people to sympathize with actual boylovers. Like communists and homosexuals in the 1950s, boylovers are so stigmatized that it is difficult to find defenders for their civil liberties, let alone for their erotic orientation. Consequently, the police have feasted on them. Local police, the FBI, and watchdog postal inspectors have joined to build a huge apparatus whose sole aim is to wipe out the community of men who love underaged youth. In twenty years or so, when some of the smoke has cleared, it will be much easier to show that these men have been the victims of a savage and undeserved witch hunt. A lot of people will be embarrassed by their collaboration with this persecution, but it will be too late to do much good for those men who have spent their lives in prison.

-- “Thinking Sex,” Gayle S. Rubin, 1984

Writing "Thinking Sex," I dimly saw the outlines of the shape of things to come, but badly miscalculated their reach, persistence, and consequences. My comments on sex and children were made in a different context, in which I assumed (wrongly, as it turned out) that no one would imagine that I supported the rape of pre-pubescents. Even now, as I write this, I am aware that whatever I say will be interpreted in the worst possible way by someone, and misconstructions are inevitable. Children are not, in fact, a major area of my interest or expertise. But why should even an exploration of such issues need to be done so gingerly and feel so dangerous? That it does is an indication of something deeply wrong.

-- “Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader,” Gayle S. Rubin, 2011

“Concurrent with Queer Nation’s creation, feminist scholars began developing the foundations for queer theory, an academic framework for unhinging heteronormative notions of sexual and gender identities from within, and beyond, the academy (Butler, 1990; de Lauretis, 1991). Efforts on both activist and scholarly fronts have similarly imagined queer as another way to think of, through, and against identity. A queer subjectivity might constitute a “blurring” of identities (Goldman, 1996), or, as Michael Warner put it, being queer is being “at odds with straight culture” (2000, p. 38).

-- ”Encyclopedia of Diversity and Social Justice”

Michel Foucault: “Firstly, in general terms, to say: yes, of course, children do have a sexuality, we can't go back to those old notions about children being pure and not knowing what sexuality is.

But we psychologists or psychoanalysts or psychiatrists, or teachers, we know perfectly well that children's sexuality is a specific sexuality, with its own forms, its own periods of maturation, its own highpoints, its specific drives, and its own latency periods, too. This sexuality of the child is a territory with its own geography that the adult must not enter. It is virgin territory, sexual territory, of course, but territory that must preserve its virginity.

The adult will therefore intervene as guarantor of that specificity of child sexuality in order to protect it. And, on the other hand, in each particular case, he will say: this is an instance of an adult bringing his own sexuality into the child's sexuality.

It could be that the child, with his own sexuality, may have desired that adult, he may even have consented, he may even have made the first moves. We may even agree that it was he who seduced the adult; but we specialists with our psychological knowledge know perfectly well that even the seducing child runs a risk, in every case, of being damaged and traumatized by the fact that he or she has had sexual dealings with an adult.

Consequently, the child must be 'protected from his own desires', even when his desires turn him towards an adult. The psychiatrist is the one who will be able to say: I can predict that a trauma of this importance will occur as a result of this or that type of sexual relation.

It is therefore within the new legislative framework - basically intended to protect certain vulnerable sections of the population with the establishment of a new medical power - that a conception of sexuality and above all of the relations between child and adult sexuality will be based; and it is one that is extremely questionable.”

Guy Hocquenghem: “There is a whole mixture of notions that makes it possible to fabricate this notion of crime or offence against decency, a highly com­plex mixture, which we do not have time here to discuss at length, but which comprises both the religious prohibitions concerning sodomy and the completely new notions, to which Michel Foucault has just referred, about what people think they know of the total difference between the world of the child and the world of the adult.

But today’s overall tendency is indisputably not only to fabri­cate a type of crime that is quite simply the erotic or sensual relationship between a child and an adult, but also, since this may be isolated in the form of a crime, to create a certain category of the population defined by the fact that it tends to indulge in those pleasures. There exists then a particular category of the pervert, in the strict sense, of monsters whose aim in life is to practice sex with children.

Indeed they become perverts and intolerable monsters since the crime as such is recognized and constituted, and now strengthened by the whole psy­choanalytical and sociological arsenal.

What we are doing is constructing an entirely new type of criminal, a criminal so inconceivably horrible that his crime goes beyond any explanation, any victim. It is rather like that kind of legal mon­ster, the term attentat sans violence: an attack without violence that is unprovable in any case and leaves no trace, since even the anuscope is unable to find the slightest lesion that might legitimate in some way or other the notion of vio­lence. Thus, in a way, public outrage to decency also realizes this, insofar as the offense in question does not require a public in order to be committed. In the case of attentat sans violence, the offense in which the police have been unable to find anything, nothing at all, in that case, the criminal is simply a criminal because he is a criminal, because he has those tastes. It is what used to be called a crime of opinion.”

-- “Foucault Live: Collected Interviews 1961-1984″

In 1979, Liberation published another petition, this time in support of Gérard R., a man on trial for having sex with girls between the ages of six and 12. It was signed by 63 people, many of them well-known intellectuals like Christiane Rochefort and Pascal Bruckner. It argued that the girls in question were “happy” with the situation. “The love of children is also the love of their bodies,” they wrote. “Desire and sexual games have their place in the relationship between children and adults. This is what Gérard R. thought and experienced with [the] girls … whose fulfillment proved to everyone, including their parents, the happiness they found with him.”

What the endorsements from prominent French intellectuals suggested was that young children possessed a right to govern their own sexuality. Under this interpretation of liberté, young children were empowered to find happiness in sexual relationships; their ability to consent was a foregone conclusion. Any effort to suggest otherwise would be a condescension, a disrespect to them as fully realized human beings. In a radio interview in 1978, Michel Foucault said of sex with minors that assuming “that a child is incapable of explaining what happened and was incapable of giving his consent are two abuses that are intolerable, quite unacceptable.”

Q: If you were a legislator, you would fix no limit and you would leave it to the judges to decide wether or not an indecent act was committed with or without consent? Is that your position?

MICHEL FOUCAULT: In any case, an age barrier laid down by law does not have much sense. Again, the child may be trusted to say wether or not he was subjected to violence. An examining magistrate, a liberal, told me once when we were discussing this question: after all, there are eighteen-year-old girls who are practically forced to make love with their fathers or their stepfathers; they may be eighteen, but it's an intolerable system of constraint. And one, moreover, that they feel is intolerable, if only people are willing to listen to them and put them in conditions which they can say what they feel. 

-- Michel Foucault, Guy Hocquenghem and Jean Danet, “The Danger of Child Sexuality”

“Like communists and homosexuals in the 1950s, boylovers are so stigmatized that it is difficult to find defenders for their civil liberties, let alone for their erotic orientation. Consequently, the police have feasted on them. Local police, the FBI, and watchdog postal inspectors have joined to build a huge apparatus whose sole aim is to wipe out the community of men who love underaged youth. In twenty years or so, when some of the smoke has cleared, it will be much easier to show that these men have been the victims of a savage and undeserved witch hunt. A lot of people will be embarrassed by their collaboration with this persecution, but it will be too late to do much good for those men who have spent their lives in prison.”

-- Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex”

“Within weeks, the federal government had enacted a sweeping bill against ‘child pornography’ and many of the states followed with bills of their own. These laws have reestablished restrictions on sexual materials that had been relaxed by some of the important Supreme Court decisions. For instance, the Court ruled that neither nudity nor sexual activity per se were obscene. But the child pornography laws define as obscene any depiction of minors who are nude or engaged in sexual activity. This means that photographs of naked children in anthropology textbooks and many of the ethnographic movies shown in college classes are technically illegal in several states. In fact, the instructors are liable to an additional felony charge for showing such images to each student under the age of 18. Although the Supreme Court has also ruled that it is a constitutional right to possess obscene material for private use, some child pornography laws prohibit even the private possession of any sexual material involving minors.

The laws produced by the child porn panic are ill-conceived and misdirected. They represent far-reaching alterations in the regulation of sexual behaviour and abrogate important sexual civil liberties.

But hardly anyone noticed as they swept through Congress and state legislatures. With the exception of the North American Man/Boy Love Association and American Civil Liberties Union, no one raised a peep of protest.”

-- Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex”

“In Western culture, sex is taken all too seriously. A person is not considered immoral, is not sent to prison, and is not expelled from her or his family, for enjoying spicy cuisine. But an individual may go through all this and more for enjoying shoe leather. Ultimately, of what possible social significance is it if a person likes to masturbate over a shoe? It may even be non-consensual, but since we do not ask permission of our shoes to wear them, it hardly seems necessary to obtain dispensation to come on them.

If sex is taken too seriously, sexual persecution is not taken seriously enough. There is systematic mistreatment of individuals and communities on the basis of erotic taste or behaviour. There are serious penalties for belonging to the various sexual occupational castes. The sexuality of the young is denied, adult sexuality is often treated like a variety of nuclear waste, and the graphic representation of sex takes place in a mire of legal and social circumlocution. Specific populations bear the brunt of the current system of erotic power, but their persecution upholds a system that affects everyone.”

-- Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex”

The takeaway from both the Sweetie project and The Child seems to be a reiteration of a point that Gayle Rubin made decades earlier: “In Western culture, sex is taken all too seriously. A person is not considered immoral, is not sent to prison, and is not expelled from her or his family, for enjoying spicy cuisine. But an individual may go through all this and more for enjoying shoe leather. Ultimately, of what possible social significance is it if a person likes to masturbate over a shoe.” Critics will no doubt insist that there is a distinction between masturbating over a shoe and masturbating over images of a virtual child. I am unconvinced. At their core, both are attempts to police the boundaries of appropriate sexual feeling, to delimit the range of possible options.”

-- James K. Harris, “Unbecoming Adults: Adolescence and the Technologies of Difference in Post-1960s US Ethnic Literature and Culture”

“... any child old enough to decide whether or not he or she wants to eat spinach, play with trucks, or wear shoes is old enough to decide whether or not he or she wants to run around naked in the sun, masturbate, sit in someone’s lap, or engage in sexuality activity.”

-- Pat Califia, third-wave feminist author and trans-identified female, who later stated that pedophiles should be more - not less - invested in children's lives.

“In the late ’70s, child porn and statutory rape laws were disproportionately enforced against gay men who had sex with adolescent males. Many of these “boys” were gay-identified. I knew several gay men who proudly called themselves boy-lovers. They were politically conscious, kind and ethical people. I wished that I had been able to rely on adults like them for guidance and erotic initiation when I was a teenager trying to come out. What the cops called “protecting children” looked like repression of queer youth to me.”

-- Pat Califia, “Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex”

“So I keep adding this qualification: “when incest is a violation,” suggesting that I think that there may be occasions in which it is not. Why would I talk that way? Well, I do think that there are probably forms of incest that are not necessarily traumatic or which gain their traumatic character by virtue of the consciousness of social shame that they produce.”

-- Judith Butler, “Undoing Gender”

“Better data on pre-adolescent climax come from the histories of adult males who have had sexual contacts with younger boys and who, with their adult backgrounds, are able to recognize and interpret the boys’ experiences. Unfortunately, not all of the subjects with such contacts in their histories were questioned on this point of pre-adolescent reactions; but 9 of our adult male subjects have observed such orgasm. Some of these adults are technically trained persons who have kept diaries or other records which have been put at our disposal; and from them we have secured information on 317 pre-adolescents who were either observed in self masturbation, or who were observed in contacts with other boys or older adults. The record so obtained shows a considerable sexual capacity among these boys. Before presenting the data, however, it should be emphasized that this is a record of a somewhat select group of younger males and not a statistical representation for any larger group. These records are based on more or less uninhibited boys, most of whom had heard about sex and seen sexual activities among their companions, and many of whom had had sexual contacts with one or more adults.”

-- Alfred C. Kinsey, “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male”

“Orgasm has been observed in boys of every age from 5 months to adolescence (Table 31). Orgasm is in our records for a female babe of 4 months. The orgasm in an infant or other young male is, except for the lack of an ejaculation, a striking duplicate of orgasm in an older adult. As described earlier in this chapter, the behavior involves a series of gradual physiologic changes, the development of rhythmic body movements with distinct penis throbs and pelvic thrusts, an obvious change in sensory capacities, a final tension of muscles, especially of the abdomen, hips, and back, a sudden release with convulsions, including rhythmic anal contractions—followed by the disappearance of all symptoms. A fretful babe quiets down under the initial sexual stimulation, is distracted from other activities, begins rhythmic pelvic thrusts, becomes tense as climax approaches, is thrown into convulsive action, often with violent arm and leg movements, sometimes with weeping at the moment of climax. After climax the child loses erection quickly and subsides into the calm and peace that typically follows adult orgasm. It may be some time before erection can be induced again after such an experience. There are observations of 16 males up to 11 months of age, with such typical orgasm reached in 7 cases.”

-- Alfred C. Kinsey, “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male”

“The most remarkable aspect of the pre-adolescent population is its capacity to achieve repeated orgasm in limited periods of time. This capacity definitely exceeds the ability of teen-age boys who, in turn, are much more capable than any older males (Tables 33, 34, 48, Figure 36). Among 182 pre-adolescent boys on whom sufficient data are available, more than half (55.5%, 138 cases) readily reached a second climax within a short period of time, and nearly a third (30.8%) of all these 182 boys were able to achieve 5 or more climaces in quite rapid succession (Tables 32–34). It is certain that a higher proportion of the boys could have had multiple orgasm if the situation had offered. Among 64 cases on which there are detailed reports, the average interval between the first and second climaces ranged from less than 10 seconds to 30 minutes or more, but the mean interval was only 6.28 minutes (median 2.25 minutes) (Table 33). There are older males, even in their thirties and older, who are able to equal this performance, but a much higher proportion of these pre-adolescent males are so capable. Even the youngest males, as young as 5 months in age, are capable of such repeated reactions. Typical cases are shown in Table 34. The maximum observed was 26 climaces in 24 hours, and the report indicates that still more might have been possible in the same period of time.

About a third of these boys remain in erection after the first orgasm and proceed directly to a second contact. There is another third that stays in erection but experiences some physical and erotic let-down before trying to achieve a second orgasm. In another third, the erection quickly subsides and there is a complete disappearance of arousal as soon as orgasm is reached. Any repetition depends upon new arousal, and that may not be possible for some minutes or hours after the original experience. Among adult males, more individuals belong to this last class, and a much smaller number remains in erection until there is a repetition of the sexual contact.

Table 34. Examples of multiple orgasm in pre-adolescent males Some instances of higher frequencies.

These data on the sexual activities of younger males provide an important substantiation of the Freudian view of sexuality as a component that is present in the human animal from earliest infancy, although it gives no support to the Freudian concept of a pre-genital stage of generalized erotic response that precedes more specific genital activity; nor does it show any necessity for a sexually latent or dormant period in the later pre-adolescent years, except as such inactivity results from parental and social repressions of the growing child.”

-- Alfred C. Kinsey, “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male”

“In an April 14, 1980, article in Time, Money was sharply criticized for what looked dangerously like an endorsement of incest and pedophilia. “A childhood sexual experience, such as being the partner of a relative or of an older person, need not necessarily affect the child adversely,” Money told Time. And according to a right-wing group critical of his teachings, Money reportedly told Paidika, a Dutch journal of pedophilia, “If I were to see the case of a boy aged 10 or 12 who’s intensely attracted toward a man in his 20s or 30s, if the relationship is totally mutual, and the bonding is genuinely totally mutual, then I would not call it pathological in any way.” Money’s response to criticism has been to launch counterattacks of his own, lambasting his adoptive country for a puritanical adherence to sexual taboos.”

-- John Colapinto, “The Case of John/Joan”

“As the twins got older, Money’s questioning grew more explicit. “Dr. Money would ask, ‘Do you ever dream of having sex with women?’ ” Brian says. “ ‘Do you ever get an erection?’ And the same with Brenda. ‘Do you think about this? About that?’ ”While attempting to probe the twins’ sexual psyches, Money also tried his hand at programming Brenda’s and Brian’s respective sense of themselves as girl and boy. One of his theories of how children form their different gender schemas—Money’s term—was that they must understand at a very early age the differences between male and female sex organs. Pornography, he believed, was ideal for this purpose. “[E]xplicit sexual pictures,” he wrote in his book Sexual Signatures, “can and should be used as part of a child’s sex education.” Such pictures, he said, “reinforce his or her own gender identity/role.”

“He would show us pictures of kids—boys and girls—with no clothes on,” Brian says. David recalls that Dr. Money also showed them pictures of adults engaged in sexual intercourse. “He’d say to us, ‘I want to show you pictures of things that moms and dads do.’

Money had two sides to his personality, according to the twins: “One when Mom and Dad weren’t around,” Brian says, “and another when they were.” When their parents were present, Money was avuncular, mild-mannered. Alone with the children he could be irritable or worse, especially when they defied him. They were particularly resistant, the twins say, to Money’s requests that they remove their clothes and inspect each other’s genitals. David recalls an occasion when he attempted to defy the psychologist. “He told me to take my clothes off,” David says, “and I just did not do it. I just stood there. And he screamed, ‘Now!’ Louder than that. I thought he was going to give me a whupping. So I took my clothes off and stood there, shaking.” In a separate conversation with me, Brian recalls that same incident. “ ‘Take your clothes off—now!’ ” Brian shouts.

Though the children could not know this, the genital inspections that Dr. Money demanded they perform were central to his theory of how children develop a sense of themselves as boy or girl—and thus, in Money’s mind, crucial to the successful outcome of Brenda’s sex reassignment. For as Money stressed in his writings of the period, “The firmest possible foundations for gender schemas are the differences between male and female genitals and reproductive behavior, a foundation our culture strives mightily to withhold from children. All young primates explore their own and each others’ genitals, masturbate, and play at thrusting movements and copulation—and that includes human children everywhere, as well as subhuman primates. The only thing wrong about these activities is not to enjoy them.”

But the children did not enjoy these enforced activities—particularly those involving “play at thrusting movements and copulation,” which Brian recalls that Dr. Money first introduced when the twins were six years old. Money, he says, would make Brenda assume a position on all fours on his office sofa and make Brian come up behind her on his knees and place his crotch against her buttocks. Variations on the therapy included Brenda lying on her back with her legs spread and Brian lying on top of her. On at least one occasion, Brian says, Dr. Money took a Polaroid photograph of them while they were engaged in this part of the therapy.

Of all the therapy the children received, this particular form of counseling left the deepest impression on both twins. Today David is still unwilling to speak about it. “There are some things I don’t want to remember,” he says. In 1989 he did describe the sessions to Jane Fontane, the woman who would become his wife. The two had just watched a TV documentary on CIA torture involving electroshock to people’s genitals. “He cried hysterically,” Jane told me. “He was crying about John Money. I’d never seen him like that. I tried to comfort him. David said Dr. Money made him go on all fours and made Brian go up behind his butt. They were being photographed. He mentioned that very act.”Brian speaks of the coital mimicry only with the greatest emotional turmoil. “It’s very hard to— I don’t understand why to this day we were forced to do that,” Brian says.”

-- John Colapinto, “As Nature Made Him”