Make perverts pathetic again

Society celebrates the hideous, the deviant and the compulsively transgressive. The result? Fat Satan aka Sam Smith, and other -- far more horrifying-- things

Trigger warning: this post features some seriously gross men being totally disgusting, and a very messed up young lady. Don’t read if you have just eaten or if you are in a despairing mood.

When I was in kindergarten in the early 1980’s, at a public school in very blue-collar Brooklyn, there was a boy in my class who caused problems for us little girls. He was simpering and voyeuristic, he would follow us into the girls bathroom and try to peek at us while we were peeing, going so far as trying to stick his head under the toilet stall door. I remember him as having permanently wet, slobbery lips, which were fixed in a creepy grimace that tried to win us over, as if to say “don’t run away girls, I’m just like you.” 

But it failed: he could not hide his trespasses on our boundaries and we would chase him away like a flock of geese going after a ferret that was trying to purloin their eggs. He was just a kid, and even at the time I felt sorry for him. It was obvious he was not in control of his urges. He was incapable of hewing to the vigilantly policed, entirely self-imposed, sex divide between girls and boys. His desperate need for us was pathetic. But it was also frightening and invasive. So in return we punished him by socially ostracising him. My pity for him and my sense that there was something painfully off in his life, was outweighed by a stronger instinct to get him the fuck away from me.

I myself was an outcast in my rough elementary school. I was from a different background to the rest of the students, and I was highly sensitive — which made me stand out like a sore thumb and be targeted by bullies. I tended to be the kind of kid who stuck up for other bullied kids. But not for this boy. Because he did something that I would not have been able to articulate as a 6 year old, but I remember how it felt. He invaded my privacy. I felt violated.

The rough justice that we meted out to that clearly disturbed boy would upset people today. And there is no doubt in my mind that he was a child in some kind of distressing situation, which was causing him to act out in such a way. But that does not mean our fighting back was wrong. Quite the contrary. He needed to know that his behaviour was unacceptable. We needed to enforce the moral order which determined his actions to be deviant, and we needed to reclaim the power he tried to steal from us by peeking up our skirts. So we did. 

This was how girl children have dealt with perverts since time immemorial. And in standing up for our rights as girls not be perved on, we kept the pervs in check just enough to keep them from being subjected to much more violent forms of vigilante justice, at the hands of bat-wielding boys and men, for example. It reinforced the clear understanding that our beings may be occasional fodder for their gross imaginations, and that was a deeply unpleasant thing to experience; but in return we told them and and everyone else in the school that they were gross perverts who needed to stay away from the Gen Pop. We made sure they stayed pathetic.¹

How the tables have turned.

Thanks to a Twitter account called @troonytoons, I now know there is a whole Twitter subculture devoted to men, dressed as women, who film themselves jerking off in women’s toilets and then post it on social media. I wonder if that kid from my kindergarten is on there somewhere? 

Now, society elevates the perverts as some sort class of high priests, and we — women — are not allowed to defend ourselves on the encroachment of our spaces. This is terrible for us, obviously. I mean, totally insane and beyond the pale. But it’s also terrible for the perverts. Hear me out. 

Now all the pervs have a get out of jail free card, all they have to do is say they are trans women. And immediately, society demands actual women just submit to their perversions. When we were allowed to publicly shame and repudiate the creepy men and boys who flashed their genitals or rubbed up against us or tried to lift up our skirts, for the most part they would skulk off back into their hovels to lick their wounds. (Obviously there are many dangerous predators who do not just leave women and girls alone, see my caveat below.) We had the upper hand, which gave the more soft-hearted among us a bit of pity for the sad sack pervs who could not help themselves. Because fundamentally, that’s what they were. When I was being creeped on by males, I wanted them to go away and leave me alone, but I wouldn’t have necessarily wanted them to be beaten to a pulp by an angry mob.

Our ostracising them was something like a valve that released pent-up anger. When cornered, these males suddenly look very sad and very small and very vulnerable. They are caught out, they know what they are doing is wrong, and the behaviour is kept somewhat in check by that. 

TroonyToons @troonytoons

Somebody find me one 60 year old woman who identifies as a baby boy. There’s none. Why? Because these are degenerate porn addicted pedo perverts.

Now their behaviour is celebrated — first in online subcultures, but it doesn’t stay there. It bubbles ever upwards. Now we can’t expel a grown man, fully nude, in our dressing rooms at the local pool, or tell a 60 year old man in Sainsbury’s who is wearing a frilly frock — because he gets a sexual thrill from us seeing him that way — that he looks hideous and not a bit like Madonna in the Like a Virgin video. 

As an aside: society’s embrace of perverts is also how we get that dreadful performance at the Grammy’s last week. Sam Smith is a chunky gay with a decent voice, and I’m not saying he is a pervert. I have no idea of his proclivities, nor do I care. But he does come across as desiring of fame, but too lazy to bother with getting a taut bod or learning how to look look hot dancing. So he takes the short cut: a meritless, artless, flabby, display of transgression. His devil horns look like they came from the nearest pound shop at Halloween. And the crowd goes wild. Though a lot of people took it very seriously, it was so thoroughly mediocre even the actual Church of Satan was unimpressed.

I’m not a psychologist, but I am a human being — and I have observed that bad behaviour that goes unchecked gets worse, not better. 

How is it possible that society condones this grotesque invasion of female reality? Isn’t the violation obscenely obvious to everyone?

How long are non-perverts going to put up with these violations on our bodily sovereignty? How long are fathers going to tolerate such disturbing violations of their daughters’ private spaces? How many perverts have gone from being merely pathetic to something even more sinister by society’s sudden acceptance of them? And when are fed up normies going to go all Taliban on their knicker-wearing asses? 

If this was society as it was even a decade ago, I would be confident in saying that a backlash — a real, physical backlash — is in the pipeline that could see these fetishists get seriously hurt. But I fear that sexual permissiveness may have changed us on some fundamental, relational level. Could we be sex-addled beyond redemption? I thought this as I watched, aghast, a video that I found even more disturbing than the TroonyTunes twitter account: a conversation between recovering leftist and anti-porn feminist Meghan Murphy and a young woman by the name of Aella, who sells sexual access to herself online and calls herself a sex researcher.

This video is one of the most wild things I’ve ever seen. In it, Meghan Murphy has to explain to an affectless and doe-eyed Aella that “data” will not convince her that incest porn and rape porn are all good. Host Benjamin Boyce seems unfazed by Aella. Perhaps because of her soft voice and pretty face, and calm, reasoned tone, Boyce barely bats an eyelid when she says she tried to find rape porn to masturbate to but it seemed to have been purged from the Internet! So annoying when that happens! She blinks in faux innocence when Murphy rejects out of hand Aella’s claim that incest porn might be ok, asking in her whispering voice and with a cute pout, ‘why is it bad to engage in it?’ Murphy admirably kept her composure. I would have been inclined to go old school mom and give her an ass whooping, but that probably would get her hot. Her “data” — the thing that allows her to tell herself that watching people be abused for sexual pleasure is totes fine — derives from Twitter polls she does. Some of those polls have titles like: “Should it be legal or ethically okay to eat a child with a mental capacity lower than the smartest animal that is regularly consumed by your culture? (assume the parents consent)”

Who am I to say how this person became so deviant. But I know that society that tells her and all those like her that sex is totally detached from morality and ethics. That engaging in any type of sex is merely like eating a sandwich and you can chose any filling you want. As a result some people, if not all people, are going to suffer very dark consequences. 

1. Of course, not all perverts are created equal. I’m referring only to the kind whose behaviour is gross but not physically threatening. The ones who act out of compulsion not out of calculation. The ones whose lack of control over their sordid desires makes them weak and vulnerable, not the rapists and abusers who are also legion and who can’t be fought off with taunts and rejection.