Men Infantilize Women and Fetishize Power
This piece was originally published at the Enemy of the Queen magazine.
Silvia Winter, right-wing Brazilian influencer. Hakim Bey, pseudo-anarchist and pedophile.
[Trigger warning: Rape, pedophilia]
Too many women relate to me when I say that I was more aggressively pursued sexually as a child than as an adult. In fact, my adult relationships were all initiated by me. The older I get, the less desirable I become to men. You may think it's because of the way age affects the body, but it's not. I still look very young, probably because of the baby face and baby bangs. As years go by, what changed the most was my attitude. I've become more confident, sure of myself, emotionally balanced and close to immune to peer pressure. These qualities are often a turn-off for men.
The disappointment is visible on a man's face when peer pressure to perform a sexual act doesn't work on me. As a child, disappointing an adult is awful. It can be damaging, and can have long-term psychological effects. When it comes to the issue of pedophilia, the discourse tends to focus much more on the child's ability to consent, and not as much on why men desire this dynamic of power in a sexual relationship. Sure, some people like “domination", but we are not discussing role-play here. We are discussing abuse of power.
Why do men get off on exerting power over someone else? This applies to everyone dealing with a man in pursuit of power — a boss, a husband, a president, a priest etc. While children are pushed to have sexual agency, girls grow to be infantilized in womanhood. The discussion fails to refrain from deciding how much autonomy a child should or should not have, instead of focusing on the real question of why men infantilize women and fetishize power.
Men are socialized to never allow their vulnerabilities to be seen, not to others or themselves. Sex is an incredibly vulnerable experience, so it's not a surprise that they can respond violently to sexual partners. So, they set on to pursue sexual relationships that don't make them feel vulnerable, by exerting control over the other. Control is both physical and psychological, which is why looking at whether the partner is happy in the situation is completely useless.
Men are the ones who need to have their actions scrutinized, not the children.
To some, this might sound obvious — it's not. It's still incredibly common for men to be perceived as victims of the irresistible sex appeal of young women. These men are not in love with these young women, they are in love with how powerful the girls make them feel. They are in love with themselves and their own pursuit of dominance. As soon as a girl becomes a woman and starts to reveal thoughts of her own and becomes less compliant, the passion erodes, and she is vilified.
Think of Lolita — A classic literary work, often seen as a masterpiece, that is nothing more than patriarchal propaganda that centers the narrative of the life of a child on the perspective of the older man who wants to possess her. In his mind, whenever she displays independent thought, she is being manipulative and taking advantage of his love for her. People seem to forget that this is his reading of the situation, and is certainly completely distorted. He is a character that had a taste of dominance and feels wronged when this dominance is later refused to him.
In Brazil, even other women reproduce this rhetoric to the detriment of young girls. This week, a right-wing influencer called Sara Winter doxxed a 10-year-old child who was about to get an abortion. She had been raped by her uncle since the age of 6, and the story Sara concocted centered the child's right to an abortion, rather than the fate of her abuser and others like him.
The show Nanette revealed how it's not just conservatives that reproduce this blind spot of male accountability. Hannah Gadsby effectively lectured us on all the abusive male artists many of us still adore. Not only individuals, but the persistent male gaze throughout all of art history.
Even within anarchist philosophy, we routinely overlook the problematic of certain intellectuals. Michel Foucault, the most cited scholar in humanities, lobbied against the French age of consent laws. He published letters in newspapers, rallied other intellectuals, and spoke publicly about how he thought there was a natural way to perform non-abusive pedophilia. And it wasn't just him, the petition to abolish consent laws in France rallied over a dozen known intellectuals, including Derrida, Sartre, and even Simone De Beauvoir.
We must note that male dominance has been perceived as “natural" for millennia, and feminism isn't giving up resistance to that concept anytime soon. This philosophical exercise against “a law" has concrete consequences in the lives of children and the socialization of women. When these relationships between older men and underage girls is glamorized, we allow for the perpetuation of a patriarchal dynamic that seeps into several aspects of our lives — political, social, as well as personal. Not to mention that these intellectual exercises become a refuge for actual abusers.
The philosophical pretext of being against moralistic Christian values and oppressive State laws was used by well-known anarchist Hakim Bey. People that know him, may not know he was a certified pedophile. And those who do know, tend to argue that his anarchist ideas are still valuable, as if they stood aside from the pedo-thing. His anarchist ideas are inseparable from the principles of NAMBLA (of which he was a member). The sole purpose of establishing his notorious autonomous zone was so he could exert sexual power over young boys with impunity. These aren't valuable ideas, they are a co-opting of anarchist values by a deranged thinker who used ideology as mask.
The anarchist movement and ideology will be held back as long as we refuse to address this issue. How can we hold people accountable within lawlessness? In anarchism, lawlessness does not mean the right to abuse power freely. How about instead of asking children if they were ok with what happened to them, we start asking men why the hell do they fetishize impressionable minds?
Final note: For more on the merit of whether pedophilia is a male problem read: Women also sexually abuse children, but their reasons often differ from men’s.
Mirna Wabi-Sabi
is site editor at Gods and Radicals Press, founding member of the Brazilian magazine Enemy of the Queen and the Plataforma 9 media collective.