Wed Apr 20/05
They're coming to get you, Barbara

It wasn't so long ago that Barbara Kay was lamenting in the National Post that "so profoundly and overtly sexualized is our culture, so early do our children understand and experience sexuality, the very word 'children' has lost the sense of inviolateness it had when Peter [Pan] and Wendy were conceived [of]." But she didn't mean "children," as it turns out. She meant "girls." To wit, her altogether extraordinary, bizarre and quite frankly offensive column (free for all, for some reason) in today's National Post, in which she posits that.

Vili [Fualaau]'s ongoing romance with [Mary Kay] Letourneau validates his complicity in the original "sexual assault" and should help put to rest the foolish legal equation of girl/older man abuse with boy/older woman seduction.

12-year-old boys who are molested by 34-year-old women, Kay argues, have not been molested at all, but rather seduced, and the seducers should face less punishment (or perhaps none — she isn't clear) than men who prey on young girls:

To an adolescent boy, the sexual attentions of an older woman are perceived either as a flattering boost to burgeoning manhood or corroboration of already developed masculine self-esteem. A boy with a woman may have been exploited, but he is unlikely to see himself as a victim.

At this point I began to wonder if my lunch had been laced with a psychoactive substance. May have been exploited? Has been exploited, in exactly the same way as a 12-year-old girl molested by a man. Children lack the ability to make important decisions for themselves; they should be able to trust adults to make those decisions for them, and to trust that they won't be taken advantage of. Sexual abuse is probably the most egregious possible breach of that trust.

Furthermore, while a woman raping a boy obviously isn't exactly the same thing as a man raping a girl, I fail to see how the child's perception of his or her own victimhood plays into it. Kay justifies it as follows:

…a 1998 study of child sexual abuse (CSA), published in the prestigious Psychology Bulletin… finds that while women suffer lasting pain and psychological dysfunction from CSA, a high proportion of male victims are unlikely to undergo lasting trauma, and many even find the experience "positive."

But this cannot possibly be separate from the phenomenon she is trying to prove. The discrepancy must derive at least in part from the (apparently) widespread notion that a man who has sex with a 12-year-old girl is deserving of castration, and the 12-year-old girl of a lifetime of counselling, while a woman who has sex with a 12-year-old boy is deserving of mild scorn, and his victim of a high five, down low, and on the flipside.

I'm not saying it's exclusively because of what Letourneau did, but it's worth pointing out that, as of the last time I checked, Fualaau is unemployed, stupid, and lacking so much as a high school diploma. Instead of doing her job and respecting her position of authority, Mary Kay Letourneau, his teacher, raped him and forced him to father two children at the age of 13. Knowing this, I find it astonishing that Kay, the self-styled scourge of the modern feminist, would write the following words:

Set the utterly weird, but socially harmless, Letourneau beside any male pederast, and you see the huge chasm between male predation and female romantic obsession. One is all about impersonal sex. The other is usually about long-term single-object love… Under Canadian criminal law, a Canadian Mary Kay Letourneau would be as guilty of sexual assault as the adult male rapist of a 12-year-old girl. Our laws should reflect the human condition, not an ideological diktat of gender parity in all things.

The bolded part is completely insubstantial: take away the words "male" and "female" and what she says is still perfectly true. Of course predation is about impersonal sex, whereas obsession is about a single person — that's what predation and obsession mean. That one gender is more prone to abuse children in a certain way than the other is not an argument for unequal punishment: men commit murder far more often than women, and mostly for different reasons, but the crime is still considered the same. And even if one accepts that male pedophiles usually lust after children in general while female pedophiles (which by definition Letourneau is, despite Kay's objections) are only interested in one kid at a time, I'm going to go ahead and suggest that it's illegal to have sex with children not because it's icky, but because it hurts children. Criminals are punished for what they've done, not for how much more they'd like to have.

"Romance, not rape" was the title of the column. Sounds nice. Would Barbara Kay sub in one of her own children or grandchildren for Vili Fualaau?