Where is the line between sexual freedom and unacceptable transgression?
Where is the line between sexual freedom and unacceptable transgression?
A sexologist makes a video about 'virtuous pedophiles,' and liberals have no defence. This sorry state of affairs is crying out for a God response.
Next weekend I am going to be taking part in a panel discussion at the Battle of Ideas festival in London, entitled: Freeing Sex from Libertines and Puritans, based off an essay I wrote by the same title, published by the excellent Letters on Liberty pamphlet series. See
for more information, including tickets to next weekend’s events.Mainstream society has come to be dominated by sex. Sexual content in school curricula, porn, and ever-proliferating, never-before-seen sexual identities are constant topics of conversation online, where a battle is being waged by three separate factions. The sexual liberals, the sexual radicals and the sexual puritans. (The full essay can be downloaded here, and copies of the pamphlet can be purchased as well.)
I grew up in a world of sexual liberals. I was taught that this was both empowering and harmless, and I lived my life accordingly. But the absolute sexual anarchy of the last few years now has me asking, in my Letters pamphlet: “where the line is, exactly, between personal freedom and unacceptable transgression”?
That rapidly disappearing line is one of the major quandaries in contemporary culture. For millions of liberal-left-progressives, the line has been obliterated entirely. Those of us who still hew to basic morality are forced to endure the resultant madness.
A few weeks ago, I came across yet another example of this, in a clip shared to X by Libs of TikTok. Some perky young-ish woman — a “sexologist” with a million YouTube subscribers, recorded herself talking about “Virtuous pedophiles.”
You might ask, “Um, what??” Don’t worry, she explains. “Virtuous pedophiles” are:
“Not virtuous as in they are better than everyone because they are attracted to children, virtuous like having moral standards and a sexual orientation that they have no control over like the rest of us. Before you get all worked up, I’m talking about pedophilia not child molestation or rape. Pedophilia is the sexual attraction to children. It’s a paraphilia…[a] kind of human diversity and development. Molestation and rape are different. These are abusive actions that often have nothing to do with attraction. Many child abusers are actually sexually attracted to adults, but they act out on children. Meaning you probably don’t object to pedophiles because you’re compassionate and rational, but you may loathe child molesters and rapists because they violate people.”
This is Dr Lindsay Doe, a wide-eyed madwoman who, like many other deranged American liberal women who run their mouths on the internet, has that cutesy affect and perky manner of speaking that belies the darkness of her content.
Her defence of the virtuousness of pedophiles obviously set X ablaze in condemnation. (I scoured her YouTube channel looking for the full video defending adults who want to have sex with children, but I couldn’t find it, so maybe she took it down.) Obviously, claiming it is harmless to have sexual thoughts about children is shocking and horrifying, and there were lots of ‘put her in the wood-chipper’ comments on social media.
But I want to pull on one particular thread that hews together her sinister argument, and is at the interface where the sexual liberals and the sexual radicals meet, and that is — there is no wrong way to do sexual desire. There can be no wrong way to do sexual desire, because if there is, that would mean that these infernally indulged adults might just, at some point in the future, have to deny themselves a moment’s pleasure.
She separates the thought of pedophilia from the act of pedophilia in a way that works in a court of law, but not in personal morality and mental health. But she also infers that there is nothing sexual about violating another person in a sexual way.
To these infernally indulged adults — the liberals and the radicals — there can be nothing negative about sex. Not even rape. Nothing can be placed wholly out of bounds, not even children.
If you came of age in the 1990’s, you are probably familiar with the thesis that rape is not about sex, it’s about power. I never bought that argument. But when 1990’s feminists made the case, at least there was a tenuous connection to the truth in it. Sexual desire contains within it power dynamics: you want something that another person has — their body — and you can get it either by consent, persuasion, or by force. And the 1990’s feminists were trying to counter-act the common defence of men who violated women’s boundaries, which was that the women were ‘asking for it,’ provoking their rapes by being too alluring. Their argument lacked insight, but it was not actively malign.
But the deranged doctor moves far beyond this. In her world, none of us can control our desires! “Sexual orientation” is something hardwired into us like our eye colour. People with green eyes can’t be blamed for having green eyes! How can nonces be blamed for lusting after children?
She attributes the desire to have sex with children to the magical concept of “human diversity” — which is something that cannot be criticised. Because everything in sex world is amazing and fun! If we practice consent, then no-one will ever get hurt!
What she fails to explain, however, is this: if having thoughts of children as sexualised objects isn’t bad, then why would acting on those thoughts be bad?
Thoughts determine our reality because, unless we treat them with ruthless discipline, our thoughts will guide our actions. And ruthless discipline is something the infernally indulged libs and the sexual radicals, do not possess.
This whole sorry state of affairs is crying out for a God response. Far be it from me to assume the role of authority on religious matters, but even a wretched sinner like myself can see we would be better off with a religiously informed understanding of sex, than whatever this dystopian nightmare is.
As Michael Knowles said in this video, liberalism has no defence against this kind of moral relativism. With a pull as inexorable as gravity, moral relativism heads in only one direction — depravity.
Without the buttress of a foundational morality with restrictions on what gives us pleasure, anything goes. We are all twisting in the wind. It’s not for nothing that the damned lovers of Dante’s Inferno, Paolo and Francesca, are buffeted by gales for all eternity. They are bound together and condemned forever for an act far, far less damaging than the sexual abuse of children.
I find it somewhat amusing that Very Smart Man Intellectuals today are desperately trying to save liberalism — which is the nest that contemporary sexual radicals hatched in — as being the only defence against the encroaching political and social darkness. This despite the fact that both today and in Europe of the 19th and early 20th centuries, liberalism failed catastrophically to stop it.
But the sexual puritans do not have the answers either. Their black and white thinking does not have any better an understanding of human behaviour than the radicals like Lindsay Doe. I don’t think myself wise enough to create a whole new concept, that both keeps the freedoms we enjoyed as liberals, but also keeps out the depraved predators and their utopian handmaidens that liberalism encouraged. As the child of the liberal, cosmopolitan, privileged West, I always remain concerned over what will replace it.