If this is your response to someone advocating the rights of all CONSENTING ADULTS to be together, something is wrong with your reading comprehension. Adults are not children. Consenting means voluntary, not an abuse situation. Consenting adults being together has nothing to do with abusing children.
Trying, but failing, to avoid looking like ignorant bigots, they might try something like “Yeah but, if we allow polyamorous, polygamous, or plural marriages, or we allow incestuous relationships or marriages, doesn't that make it more likely children will be abused by normalizing it? Isn't the next step moving on to children?”
This is an attempt at guilt by false association. It is something LGBTQ+ people have been dealing with forever. “If you allow gay people to be together, it will make it easier to molest children!” It simply doesn’t follow. It’s a lie that most LGBTQ+ people want to abuse children, and it is likewise a lie that people who are ethically nonmonogamous or consanguinamorous want to abuse children. Child abusers are going to try to abuse children. Children will be more likely to be abused and to keep quiet about it the more taboo we keep sex in general.
There are places where consanguinamorous relationships between adults are not criminalized, including a couple of US states. This has not caused an increase in child abuse in these places.
When it comes to ethical nonmonogamy, citing a few isolated villages or compounds where women don’t have equal rights and children are treated as property as proof it leads to child abuse is dishonest. Children are abused by professing monogamists every day, while most parents involved in ethical, disclosed, or consensual nonmonogamy are great parents who are not abusing children in any way.
Keeping unjust discrimination in place is wasting resources vitally needed to prevent and stop actual abuse. It makes it less likely victims and witnesses of abuse will cooperate with authorities if their own relationships are criminalized. Every bit of time and money wasted on trying to stop consenting adults from being together how they mutually agree is time and money that isn’t being spent to help people who are actually being abused.
There is no good reason to deny consenting adults their rights to be together how they mutually agree.
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ReplyDeleteof course adults aren’t children.
ReplyDeleteAs long as adults don't misuse them, its okay. But I see it constantly overabused.
ReplyDeletePeople default to calling incest abuse so quickly they don't even give themselves time to see it through. I little while back I met a wonderful young woman who was interested in having a sexual relationship with her father and wanted to talk to me about it (i'm a moth in an active incest family here so often give advice ). After explaining what she wanted i asked why she worried about pursuing it to which she replied "what about if it's abuse?". I thought she meant her abusing her dad but, no, She literally thought that wanting sexual relations with her dad and trying to make it happen meant she was getting abused somehow. After some basic reasoning on the topic i'm happy to say she realized how twisted her mind had become by this and shook off that awful stigma we face.
ReplyDeleteThis is what we're up against. Not logic. Just a trained knee-jerk response. Something you say and even feel in response to it without even thinking through the facts of it. There is hope though. So many feel and know it's wrong, they just need help realizing it.
Great comment and totally agree with you. Glad you managed to help this young woman and hope she got what she wanted with her dad. This is an issue for parents too and they worry that what they are feeling is wrong and doing something maybe abuse. This is something that is getting in the way of something natural and should be enjoyed not feared.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with your logic and your conclusions.
ReplyDeleteRecently, I came across another phenomenon: people are convinced that sexual abuse (SA) in the family significantly prevails over other types of SA, citing some statistical studies. This belief leads to the direct conclusion that ALL sexual and romantic relationships between adult relatives are always SA.
Of course, immediately people become enraged and also begin to throw in the face of opponents that such a relationship (incest, consunguinamory) provokes incestuous violence against children.
Any logical arguments that statistics cannot be trusted without evidence, that everything depends on the position of researchers, that voluntary incest is not always violence, that cases of sexual abuse of older family members over minors are by no means widespread, do not work on such bigots.
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I would also like to draw attention to the following circumstances. We and our allies and like-minded people advocate voluntary conscious sexual romantic relationships among ADULT relatives. And what about teenagers, boys and girls who have not reached the age of majority (which varies in different countries)?
After all, they very often have deep feelings for their siblings, even for adult (legally) family members. And they are most vulnerable, it is on their fragile souls and minds that the terrible word "taboo" falls. They experience the agony of not being able to behave with the objects of their love the way they would behave towards non-family members. Very often they get the impression (under the influence of mass media, church and public opinion) that romantic feelings for a relative are either a disgusting perversion or impossible at all. That only sex is possible. Therefore, many do not begin to court the objects of their feelings, to date them, but immediately proceed to physical measures, that is, touching, hugging, peeping, masturbation, etc. And then the terrible words "SA" or "rape" appear.
And this distorts the lives of teenagers, boys and girls forever, and serves as a source of many mental illnesses.
It is the category of relatives that I have named that needs protection and help the most.
I am not saying this unfounded. Unfortunately, I have such an experience, although not in the form of a criminal offense, but this experience has seriously affected me all my life.