Ashford is one pedophile about whom no one needs worry. The bad ones are those who find children to be easier pickings than adult sexual partners. The latter are not only more likely to act on their urges, but also more likely to kill the kids afterwards. I know 'sick' is constantly thrown at both types, but from what I have read, neither type is necessarily considered mentally ill by psychologists.

Welcome to the new witch hunt - same as the old one.

I've said this before in various places - I was pretty much ready and willing to have sex by about 10 or so.

If I had known then what I know now, I probably would have tried to do something about the crushes I had on some of my teachers.

And even more shocking? It probably would have been a very healthy experience for me. I was so uptight and terribly, painfully undersexed. I was also terribly guilted out and dogmatized by my sexuality by the religion of choice of my family.

It would have been very, very good for me, in the right situation, with the right woman.

You can argue and disbelieve this until you're blue, going on purple in the face. You could reach for the easy, low hanging accusation of Oedipal Complexes - one narrow, archaic psychological model that'd best be left moldering.

You'd be wrong, because it isn't your hypothetical choice, nor will you ever be me, nor will you ever be able to dedicate the amount of thought and instrospection I've given it. And for all I care people can take their Puritanical, dogmatic, and ill-formed psychologies of sexuality and stick 'em where the sun don't shine.

Now, to be clear, I'm generally not attracted to people younger than me at all - much less very young people. I'm neither defending nor condeming this.

But as a very young child I can remember being so terribly attracted to women older than me. Goddamnit, I was ready. I was ready for nearly a decade before I had any fun. It bothers me a great deal that the state thinks it knows best how to use my own body, and it's grating and fascist.

So, yeah. I am, at least, one such human being who, as a child, was very deeply and profoundly attracted to other human beings much older than themselves. I'm not alone.

Furthermore, the gigantic dayglow elephant in the room in all these titallating, shock-and-horror witch hunts is that the VAST majority of crimes of sexual abuse are perpetrated by relatives and friends of family or other trusted figures.

But mostly by relatives.

Even the statistics of outright rape are similar - it's most often someone the victim knows.


All this shit bothers the fuck out of me because there's people out there who can't even get a job or a house because they simply took a piss in alley at the wrong time and picked up "indecent exposure" charges. So they're labeled as a "sex offender" for life.

Witch hunts fucking suck. Crime sucks, yes, and abuse sucks, quite true - but we MUST be dispassionate about it if we're to see clearly and objectively.

I often suspect that our reactions to abuse are so dramatic because of how widespread and systemic sexual abuse may be. If it has happened to a vast majority of us - are we going to be able to collectively approach the issue rationally?

Echoing loquacious, although I didn't experience full penetration intercourse until I was 12, my sex life began when I was still a pre-schooler with other farm kids. Since animal husbandry was an essential part of farm life, keeping the kids ignorant of the facts of life was virtually impossible.

One thing I have noticed about sex-offender registries and residential limitations is that they are now brushing up against what I consider cruel and unusual punishments, particularly in Florida where one county is housing prior sex offenders under an overpass. That's going too far.