The world’s scholars are tasked with investigating important and even controversial topics in their pursuit of truth and virtue. A newly published article violates this call in a disturbing way. The manner in which it does is certainly worth our attention and condemnation.
The article, entitled “Childhood Sexualities: On Pleasure and Meaning from the Margins,” was published last month in the American Sociological Association’s journal Sex & Sexualities. It is authored by a scholar from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa whose stated specialty is childhood sexuality. She employs all the necessary buzz phrases so fashionable in leftist social justice theory, such as this opening line: “This article repositions childhood sexualities within a pleasure-centered, globally oriented, and power-aware frame informed by feminist, queer, and decolonial perspectives.” The article “interrogate[s] dominant narratives of sexual innocence that suppress young people’s desires and show how children negotiate pleasure and meaning amid intersecting hierarchies of age, race, gender, and class.”
This author is deeply concerned that “nowhere is this politics of misrecognition, erasure, and marginalization more acute than in childhood, where preadolescent children’s erotic capacities are routinely pathologized.” Yes, she is deliberately positioning that which is good and protective to appear evil.
The article is just over 3,000 words of this kind of thing. It is certainly not serious scholarship. It is a subversive ramble. But it got published all the same by an otherwise respectable sociological association.
The article’s thesis is predicated on this claim that is as bold as it is false: “What is clear is that the notion of childhood sexual innocence is not a natural construct.” The sexual innocence of every child that has ever been born is among the most natural of things. The very definition of childhood itself is that of innocence and wonder. G. K. Chesterton spoke truth in observing, “For children are innocent and love justice; while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.”
While one of the domineering virtues of childhood is innocence, a most damning vice of adulthood is the sexualization of children. This article gratuitously trades in the latter, objecting to “a colonial fiction that has long erased the very thought of putting sexuality and childhood together.” It advocates for the linking of the two in the name of everything they deem right and good. Why? Well, as this author explains, “Sexual pleasure and meaning are integral to understanding why children do what they do, and how they can be supported to lead healthier, happier lives.” Thus, “It is time for sexualities research to hone in on the meanings of sexual pleasure for children and young people.”
Every person who possesses any sense of reason and compassion for children and childhood must state that such a time will never come. They should recognize and denounce articles such as these as the latest effort to de-stigmatize sexualizing children and erase protective age-of-consent boundaries.
The author makes her intentions known in the conclusion of the article, stating, “Our focus is more than just an inversion of the usual risk-focused narrative; it is a call to transform how we think about childhood sexuality and whose experiences we value.”
We shudder to think what those valued experiences are. Yes, very bad people posing as serious academics are making real progress toward the further sexualization of our children. Academics and the journals who publish their pedophilic proposals take note: “It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were cast into the sea than that he should cause one of these little ones to sin” (Luke 17:2, ESV).
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