I've been reading Erin Pizzey and I'm formulating a theory that there is a connection between this paedohysteria and feminism and it comes through the demonisation of male sexual desire.

With that, I now read, "Up to 64,000 women in UK 'are child-sex offenders'", in today's Guardian online: www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/oct/04/u...-child-sex-offenders

This leads me to wonder, is there not a chance to dismantle both, by exploiting this flaw in the otherwise crystaline picture of separation between male and female as evil and divine.

For one thing, men are not allowed near children any more. By default, they cannot be trusted. Shouldn't we adopt the same attitude towards women. Men working in child care are suspect. Shouldn't women be just as suspect. We will then end up trusting no one. The children can run free.

The theory goes as follows. In the early sixties women activists grew jealous of the male counterparts who denied them more vigorous roles in the movement for civil rights. This lead to the idea of a women's movement specifically for women. They adapted the marxist ideas current at the time to propose the idea of a class war between men and women. To this end, all men were seen as oppressors, no matter how gentle, loving and sincere. All that was just the ideology of oppression, the bourgeois superstructure, as it were. Women, on the other hand, were seen as meek, humble, innocent victims of male oppression, every one. This developed into the idea of male sexual desire as inherently predatory, harmful and destructive, much in line with the comments I was referring to the other day on Comment is Free.

Fast forward to the current decade or so and we have this demonisation of male sexual desire being adapted to the idea that all men have lurking within them some sort of latent desire to be sexual with children, or at least that many do and they must all be held as suspect, and that it is men alone who are capable of such things.

At the same time, women's sexual desire has been denied and repressed, on this view. Only recently discovered is that women have sexual fantasies just as men do. Women, then, must be encouraged to express themselves sexually, for the sake of equality. Women must be equal partners in sexual agency with men.

Here I grow confused. Clearly, women's sexuality is seen as morally pure, due to its association with the victimhood of repression. But what is the connection between that and paedophilia?

The idea that male sexual desire is the problem is connected with the idea that they can harm children. But it takes off on its own when the children harmed cannot even be identified, or no harm is actually done to them. Instead the desire itself is penalised.

Where does the Augustinian idea of all sex as evil come into this? What about the natural shame we tend to feel around sex?

Plainly children are suffering in all kinds of ways all the time: 12,000 starved per day, gaza hundreds dead with our help, the iraq half-million killed by our sanctions, road accidents, natural disease, abuse by parents thought somehow to be less egregious, bullying at school, death and injury in play, suicide, gun and knife crime. The list is endless.

Somehow all perspective has been lost. Paedophilia is given attention and attracts fear out of all proportion to extent of the harm done. The deciding factor seems to be the sexual pleasure obtained. This is what causes outrage, not the harm to the children.

Imagine the picture. "Our children are not telling us whether you did anything to harm them. We cannot tell whether you did anything to harm them. No consequence can be detected by which means we could tell. Yet we need to know whether you harmed them for our own peace of mind." Isn't it the case that what they really want to know is not whether harm was done to their children, but whether pleasure was obtained by means of them?

By this means also, we can explain the prevalent idea that the harm is replicated every time images of abuse are viewed again. See Barbara Ellen's piece in The Observer today, 4/10/09. Is it really replicated even if the children do not know? Can we be sure they are harmed? What if they are not even recognized or recognizable in the images? What if they cannot even recognize themselves? Why are people falling over themselves to concur in these hysterical conclusions without asking these obvious questions? Why is it that even raising these questions myself causes me to fear the reaction of the police?