In great matters men show themselves as they wish to be seen; in small matters as they are.

- Gamaliel Bradford
 

Men in general are but great children.

- Napoleon
 

Australia - Two out of every 5 young men in at least one country town believe it is okay to force a woman to have sex with them, a survey has revealed.  The finding came out of a limited survey of 40 young men in Port Lincoln, a South Australian tuna fishing town, conducted as part of a sexual health project.

Forty percent of the high school students surveyed agreed it was okay to use force, especially if the woman had previously had sex with him or if she started to get sexual but then said no.  A more extensive survey in Adelaide in 1997 of 998 men, found 31.7% of young men believed sexual violence was acceptable in some circumstances. - AAP

Source: The Evening Post Wednesday 19 January 2000

Sexual Harassment Okay as It Ensures Humans Breed, Russian Judge Rules

by Adrian Blomfield

The unnamed executive, a 22-year-old from St Petersburg, had been hoping to become only the 3rd woman in Russia's history to bring a successful sexual harassment action against a male employer.  She alleged she had been locked out of her office after she refused to have intimate relations with her 47-year-old boss.  "He always said that female workers signalled to him with their eyes that they desperately wanted to be laid on the boardroom table as soon as he gave the word," she earlier told the court.  "I didn't realise at first that he wasn't speaking metaphorically."

The judge said he threw out the case not through lack of evidence but because the employer had acted gallantly rather than criminally.  "If we had no sexual harassment we would have no children," the judge ruled.

Since Soviet times, sexual harassment in Russia has become an accepted part of life in the office, workplace and university lecture room.  According to a recent survey, 100% of female professionals said they had been subjected to sexual harassment by their bosses, 32% said they had had intercourse with them at least once and another 7% claimed to have been raped.  80% of those who participated in the survey said they did not believe it possible to win promotion without engaging in sexual relations with their male superiors.  Women also report that it is common to be browbeaten into sex during job interviews, while female students regularly complain that university professors trade high marks for sexual favours.

Only two women have won sexual harassment cases since the collapse of the Soviet Union - one in 1993 and the other in 1997.  Human rights activists say that Russian women remain 2nd-class citizens and are subjected to some of the highest levels of domestic abuse in the world.

Source: telegraph.co.uk 30 Jul 2008

Sex Country

A Walk on the Depraved Side

Pattaya - On a typical evening at the Royal Garden Plaza, a shopping mall in the seaside town of Pattaya, foreign men lead Thai children around the arcades and buy them toy animals.  The men's motives can be sinister.  As the evening winds down, some end up at hotels where, according to the local police, the men pay the children 500 baht (US$13) or so for sex.  This is the darkest side of Thailand's notorious sex business and one which many Thais want to see brought to an end.  Outside one hotel, a sign reads "End Child Sex Tourism Now!"

A Bangkok-based group, End Child Prostitution and Trafficking, has campaigned relentlessly against child prostitution, but this has not stopped foreign paedophiles from visiting Thailand.  Indeed, the Thai police believe the number of foreigners travelling to the country to have sex with children is rising.  All across Southeast Asia an increasing number of young children are thought to be at risk.  At a conference in the Philippines this week, trafficking in people, often for the purposes of prostitution, was described as "modem-day slavery".  It is estimated that about 250,000 Asians, mostly women and children, are bought and sold every year.

In Thailand, several recent cases involving sexual predators have made headlines.  One involved an American musician, working at a swanky Bangkok hotel, who was accused of molesting girls.  A Swedish tourist has also been convicted of committing sexual crimes against a child.

For years, child-welfare organisations have criticised Thailand's tourism industry for often helping to promote the image of Thai women and children as passive sex objects.  The symbols are almost everywhere: in Pattaya, one bar dresses its teenage strippers in school uniforms.  But many aid workers blame the lingering effects of the regional financial slump for the surge in the sexual abuse of children.  There has been little economic recovery in slum areas, says Father Joe Maier, of the Human Development Foundation, a group working with poor children.  "More kids are entering the illegal economy, which means more children available for pædophiles," he says.  There is evidence to support his claim in a recent study by Thailand's health ministry.

However, officialdom must also share the blame.  Policemen and judges can be bribed to release foreign sex criminals.  In the past 8 months, two alleged pædophiles, one Japanese and the other British, were caught by Pattaya police in hotel rooms with underage boys.  Neither was convicted.  The Japanese man later alleged he had paid 600,000 baht for an acquittal.  In the other case, although the victim originally told the police he had been purchased for sex, in court he changed his evidence to say he had merely been let into the hotel room out of pity.  Child-welfare advocates hope a new law due in September will force Thai police to interview children more sensitively.  It may go some way to discourage pædophiles.  In the past, brusque interrogators frightened children, making them less willing to confront their abusers.

Yet few people are optimistic that child-sex tourism can be stopped completely in Thailand.  The Internet has become a means for sex tourists to share information about the best places to purchase the services of children.  Although some websites promoting child sex in Thailand have recently been shut down, the police admit that patrolling the Internet is virtually impossible.

Source: The Economist 1 April 2000 economist.com

I personally know a successful Wellington businessman who makes no secret of the fact that he goes to Thailand regularly to engage in sex with young children of both sexes.  He says he "loves" Thailand because "it's so open - anything goes there."  Occasionally he is accompanied by other businessmen from Wellington.

Some obstacle is necessary to swell the tide of the libido to its height.
In times during which no obstacles to sexual satisfaction existed, such as during the civilisations of antiquity, love became worthless,
life became empty, and strong reaction-formations were necessary before the indispensable emotional value of love could be recovered.

- Freud, 1912
The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life

I hope Freud is correct because I'd like to think it isn't just the children in Thailand's sex bars who are being hurt.  It seems fitting to think that businessmen with nothing better to do with their money but to spend it on abusing young children with impunity are in reality desperately, frantically, searching for something - anything - to keep their lives from feeling so empty.

The child molester feels good in a position of total power and control.  There are other complicating factors: often aggression and arousal are linked.  1 in 6 children even in Australia are sexually abused at some time, usually by a man who is part of their family or social circle.  A pædophile is one who has rejected the difficult path of intimacy and equality for one of domination and exploitation.

Unfortunately, it isn't usually clear how much of that rejection was actually under his control.  If technology determines pædophilism is genetic, should chemical or physical castration be an option?  Forced genetic modification?

When does the punishment outstrip the crime?

------- Original Message --------
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2008
From: popsy30@msn.com

This message was posted via the Feedback form.

Comments: The black and white photo you have used in your paedophile report covering Thailand/Pattaya (see photo above) isn't showing any sinister behaviour.  Kids often go to tourists areas (including bars) to sell flowers, gum, et cetera.  Usually their parents are standing a few feet away.  Any paedophile activity is completely hidden (as it is in NZ).  No tourists (including regular sex tourists) or Thais would tolerate any paedophile behaviour in public.

Discretion is the most important thing?  Because otherwise public outrage would cause a backlash?  I see.  How very civil.

Losers

Those who win only by cheating or aggression are still losers.

Here's another theory:

The Individual and Social Ethics

by Bertrand Russell

Misers, whose absorption in means is pathological, are generally recognised to be unwise, but minor forms of the same malady are apt to receive undue commendation.  Without some consciousness of ends, life becomes dismal and colourless; ultimately the need for excitement too often finds a worse outlet than it would otherwise have done, in war or cruelty or intrigue or some other destructive activity.

Men who boast of being what is called "practical" are for the most part exclusively preoccupied with means.  But theirs is only one-half of wisdom.  When we take account of the other half, which is concerned with ends, the economic process and the whole of human life take on an entirely new aspect.  We ask no longer: what have the producers produced, and what has consumption enabled the consumers in their turn to produce?  We ask instead: what has there been in the lives of consumers and producers to make them glad to be alive?  What have they felt or known or done that could justify their creation?  Have they experienced the glory of new knowledge?  Have they known love and friendship?  Have they rejoiced in sunshine and the spring and the smell of flowers?  Have they felt the joy of life?

Source: Authority and the Individual: The First Reith Lectures for 1948-9 by Bertrand Russell

And, to be fair, it isn't only men who indulge their passions...

Sex Tourism As Economic Aid

by Julie Bindel

Middle-aged women jetting into Jamaica for sex don't see themselves as using prostitutes.

Two flights are due into Montego Bay Airport, one from Toronto, the other from London.  waits on the beach for the new arrivals, hoping that one of them will bring him good fortune.  "I look for the milk bottles," he says, explaining how ultra-white skin is a giveaway, "the ones who've just arrived.  Milk bottles that need filling..."

Negril, with its 11-kilometre stretch of pristine sand and turquoise sea, attracts the majority of Jamaica's 1.3 million tourists every year, primarily from the United States, Canada and Europe.  It is known as a "swinging" resort.  Many white Western women come to Negril for precisely that.  Clinton is one of hundreds of young men working the beach and, like most of the "beach boys", he is desperately poor.  His primary income comes from accompanying lone female travellers who want sex with Jamaican men.

He lives with his family in a shack with no electricity or running water.  In contrast, the hotels and apartments that line the beach are luxurious, with rooms costing $US200 ($300) a night.  While some beach boys may be content to have their meals paid for, the goal is marriage to a Westerner and a ticket out of poverty.

Clinton has a "regular girlfriend", a 45-year-old Canadian professional who comes to see him four times a year.  "She's a good friend and she looks after me.  Sends me money when I can't pay my rent."  Clinton says he works "in the tourist industry" and won't admit he is a beach boy.  "If I take a tourist out, and she wants to help me out as a friend, give me money and let me stay with her in the hotel, what's wrong with that?  Of course I have sex with them, but that's because I'm not gay - I like women."  Clinton's current "girlfriend" is a 50-year-old grandmother from the US, whom he met the day before.

Negril, like some resorts in the Dominican Republic and Cuba, is known as a place where white middle-aged women come in search of what they call the "big bamboo."  British researchers Jacqueline Sanchez Taylor and Julia O'Connell Davidson found that the usual analysis of sex tourism did not allow for the possibility of women as buyers of sex, because "prostitute-users are, by definition, male, and this assumption is shared by many researchers and theorists."

The two researchers interviewed 240 women holidaying in Negril and two similar resorts in the Dominican Republic.  Almost a third of the interviewees had engaged in sexual relationships with local men during their holiday.  Though 60% admitted to certain "economic elements" to their liaisons, they did not perceive the encounters as prostitute-client transactions, nor did they view their sexual partners as prostitutes.  Those who admit to coming to Negril for sex believe they are helping the men and the local economy by giving them money and gifts.

HIV and AIDS figures reflect the fact that condom use by the beach boys is sporadic.  In the tourist areas, the number of those infected is higher than elsewhere on the island.  Last year, an estimated 20,000 adults and children out of a population of 2.6 million were living with AIDS or HIV - a figure that had more than doubled in two years.

Ms Sanchez Taylor and Ms O'Connell Davidson suggest that the reason many female tourists are able to delude themselves into believing they are not prostitute users lies in their racialised power over the men: "Racist ideas about black men being hypersexual and unable to control their sexuality enable them to explain to themselves why such young and desirable men would be eager for sex with older and/or overweight women, without having to think that their partners are interested in them only for economic reasons." - The Guardian

Source: smh.com.au 12 July 2003

The Tramp

by John Lanchester

The tramp at the front of the bus must be, has to be, certainly looks, very smelly.  He has the ingrained patina of dirt which comes from living rough.  Not that this seems to put the schoolgirl off, and the two of them now appear to be getting on famously.  Almost everything the tramp says seems to reduce her to helpless laughter.  In turn, when she speaks he leans forwards "hanging on her every word."  "If you can make them laugh you're halfway there," Mr Phillips once heard girl-confident Martin confiding to girl-shy Thomas in the back of the car on the way home from a party.  The tramp seems to be acting on the same maxim.  His armpits and sweat-steeped clothes must be emitting who knows what odors; but she doesn't seem to mind in the least.  In fact, convulsing with laughter at this latest sally, she leans forwards and slaps him on the thigh as if begging him to stop before she breaks a rib.  It is an unschoolgirlish gesture and an unexpected one, though not as unexpected as what follows when the tramp, seizing the day, kisses her on the side of the cheek as she turns away.

Sweet 16 and never been kissed, thinks Mr Phillips, not very relevantly, but then he feels his grip on things beginning to loosen.  Now she is looking down, blushing, but not seeming too unhappy about the latest development.  The same could not be said for the rest of the passengers on the upper deck.  There are mutterings and rufflings, muffled consternation.  The two women in front of Mr Phillips are whispering unoverhearable, shocked somethings to each other.  Then they go silent and rigid as the tramp reaches out, oddly gentle, and turns the girl's face toward him, and starts kissing her in earnest.  A voice from the back of the bus, audibly anguished, gives an involuntary cry of "No."  Someone else can be heard to say, "Somebody stop him!"  But the person most closely concerned, the schoolgirl herself, evidently doesn't want to stop him.  She is energetically returning the tramp's kisses; from the way their cheeks and jaws are moving, you can clearly tell that both tongues are involved.  Mr Phillips feels the twinge of nausea that always overtakes him when he sees people kissing - actors on the screen are bad enough.  Real people are always worse.  It is something to do with the texture of tongues, their snail-like smoothness and sliminess, and the idea of other people's mouths; you wouldn't want to explore someone else's mouth in theory, only in practice.

At Grimshaw's the most junior accountants had a popular game called "Would you rather?" involving the invention of fantastically repulsive alternatives: "Would you rather" - a voice would ask, usually in the pub after work - "suck snot off Mr. Wink's mustache or have poxy Patty [the boss's 20-stone secretary] sit on your face and fart?"  For Mr Phillips, keen on kissing in practice, the idea of kissing has something of a "Would you rather?" about it.

These two have no such difficulty.  The tramp and the schoolgirl are now openly engaged in what can be described only as a snog.  One of his hands is clamped to the back of her head.  The other is out of sight elsewhere about her person.  Her eyes are closed, her arms around him.  Luckily the bus is making too much noise for any cries or moans to be audible.  Mr Phillips doesn't know what to think.  He is looking straight ahead, slightly to one side of the couple, but they are on full display in his peripheral vision.

"Ought to be a law against it," he catches from one of the women in front of him.  She is in an ecstasy of outraged propriety.

The bus stops.  They are further along the Embankment, just to the south of Victoria Station.  The tramp and the schoolgirl seem to have reached some agreement.  They get up together, tittering happily and leaning against each other, and make for the stairs, which the girl descends first, her hand stretched back to the tramp, who looks younger and happier than he did when he got on but still far gone in filth.  There is a general sense of relief in which Mr Phillips shares.  Mr Phillips hears someone say the actual words "Well I never."  He risks a look out the window at the happy couple, who are now sort of skipping off up the pavement.

Source: Anderson Valley Advertiser 12 July 2000

What is meant to be more shocking: the girl's youth or the tramp's filth?  His age or his poverty?  What particulars would need to be changed for the story to no longer shock?  See also the next page in this section, Enjo Kosai, for a situation in which filth and poverty are removed but age disparities remain.

In North Korea, starving peasants are eating corpses (see North Koreans Selling Human Flesh on Black Market).  Would the mother of a beautiful daughter in North Korea be willing to send her child to Thailand so that narcissistic middle-aged balding greying drooping capitalists could buy her toys prior to paying her for sex?

Perhaps.  But she'd certainly choose something better than that for her if she could.

Instead of spending money policing sex crimes, perhaps that money would be better spend funding industries that provide jobs to parents.  Thus they'd have better options than sending their kids out to on the streets to solicit sex.  It would be nice if some of those men were merely buying a few toys for cute little kids who obviously had very few.  How about it guys?  Just being nice can also feel good.

For Ugandan Girls, Delaying Sex Has Economic Cost

by Marc Lacey

Kampala, Uganda- The biggest threat to Lillian's virginity may not be her hormones or those of the boys in her high school class.  It may be her empty pockets and her ambition that prompt her to have sex.  Lillian, a 16-year-old orphan, would be any parent's dream child.  She studies hard and picks her friends carefully.  She avoids bad influences, a challenge in this rugged slum on the outskirts of Kampala, the capital, and she is so committed to avoiding AIDS that she has become a leader in her school's Straight Talk club, which promotes abstinence.  AIDS, a devastating killer in her community, is always on this young girl's mind.  The disease ended the lives of both her parents while she was in primary school.  The uncle who then became her guardian died of AIDS as well.  She is intent on avoiding infection, and delaying sex is her - and her country's - answer.

President Bush, on his recent tour of Africa, praised Uganda's anti-AIDS approach, which emphasizes abstinence.  In Uganda, condoms are considered an imperfect alternative for those who cannot wait.  But the situation is not that simple.  Lillian's story and those of some of her classmates show the challenges that African young people, especially the girls, can face in trying to avoid the AIDS virus.  Sex starts early here for a variety of reasons.  There is the sexual curiosity that stirs in young people everywhere.  Marriage for young girls is common as well, with girls dropping out of school, often to become an older man's second or third wife.  Sex also presents an opportunity to make money, and young women find few jobs available.  Poverty, it seems, can weaken even those with the most resolve.

"It's easy to say, 'Abstain,'" said Benjamin Wamusiru, an English teacher who leads the abstinence club at a local school.  "But actually doing it is difficult with all the pressures in society.  We lose members because of pregnancy.  As time goes by, more and more of the club members experiment.  It's toughest on the girls."

A dedicated student who dreams of going to college, Lillian struggles to come up with the fees that all secondary school students in Uganda are required to pay.  For Lillian - who, like some of her other classmates agreed to be interviewed on the condition that her last name not be used - the tuition comes to about $30 a month.  Recently, some of the cousins with whom she has been living since her uncle's death have begun pressuring her to raise money by selling herself.  "They say, 'Why don't you find a sponsor?'" she said, dressed in her dark blue school uniform and looking very young.  "I know what they mean.  They want me to do what so many girls do and get a sugar daddy.  You give him what he wants, and he gives you what you want."

The other young women at Lillian's school say they are propositioned just about every day by older men who offer them a chance of a better life in exchange for sex.  The abstinence clubs are popular with most students prodded into joining by their parents.  But many young people, as young as 12 or 13, have already begun sexual relationships.  For them, abstinence is an abstraction.  In many of their minds, sex brings opportunity - with infection an unwelcome byproduct.  "These big men will say, 'Come, get in the car and I'll give you a life,'" said Ruth, who is 16.  The older men wave cash and cellphones, a sign of prestige in poor communities, and they talk about lives far more glamorous than the ones the girls are living.  They do not bring up their HIV status.

"It's so common to see old men, even teachers, with much younger girls," said Patricia, 18, who had sex with her teenage boyfriend years ago but has since decided to abstain.  "Everywhere you go, there's pressure from guys."  She said that poverty makes it hard to resist.  "Some of us are orphans," she said.  "We are barely getting by.  If someone comes along and says he'll buy you soap, you might try it.  He gives you 1,000 shillings, and you hope next time he'll give you 2,000."  Two thousand shillings, about $1, is a meaningful sum in this country.

At the abstinence club, all the talk is about sex, sometimes explicitly.  At a recent meeting, there was frequent giggling.  The most direct message was that sex is dangerous these days and best left for adulthood.  "We learn to not even listen to the guys' promises," Patricia said.  "You don't express interest.  You say no and then you walk away.  Of course, some characters will continue to bother you.  But you have to to resist."

Not everyone does.  One club member dropped out of school last year after she became pregnant by a man who was paying her school fees.  Other girls who are members of the club were disciplined after they were found sneaking out of the school dormitory and going to nightclubs.  "Some married men tried to get us," Ruth, who was one of the violators, said, but none succeeded.

As for Lillian, she did not attend the club's most recent meeting not because she had lost interest.  School officials had given her and other students notices to pay the money they owed the school.  Lillian's bill came to about $90.  She did not know where she would find the money.  "It's difficult for me to say what I'll do," she said glumly.  At first she rejected outright suggestions by her cousins that she find a man to solve her financial woes.  But the more she talked about it, the more her resolve seemed to weaken.  If she did have sex, she said, it would not be about love, because marriage would end her education.  And she would try to remember everything the club had taught her.  She would use a condom and hope that the man would be kind.  "If it was a single man who wasn't married, if he had good character, maybe I'd consider it," she said.  "It would be for my future."

Source: The New York Times Tuesday 19 August 2003

Also see:

	The Social Market - for suggestions on ways to reduce a child's labour without increasing his or her destitution.
	Never Too Old (further on in this section) - City police have accused a 75-year-old man of impregnating a 10-year-old girl he met at his senior centre.  Jimmy Kave of Bridgeport, Connecticut admitted having sex with the girl several times, but claims she had enticed him, police said...

For more articles related to Men including sperm donations on the net, the effects of testosterone, condom sizes, buddies, smells, nagging, gynæcologists, mid-life crises, fathers and more click the "Up" button below to take you to the Table of Contents page for this section.