Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Photo from Gilding’s page, hosted at Photobucket.

Gilding of Gilding the Lily brings news of a telling word and illustrates it with an even more telling picture.

‘Lolicon’ is a slang portmanteau of the phrase “Lolita complex”. In Japan, the term is used to describe an attraction to girls below the age of consent, or an individual attracted to such a person. Outside Japan, the term most often refers to a genre of manga and anime where childlike female characters are depicted in a sexualized manner or engaged in sexually explicit acts. The equivalent term for the sexualization of or attraction to young boys is shotacon.

As the genre created by and for men evolved, according to Kinsella, it moved from these cute, tough heroines towards depictions of girls as sexual victims: naked, helpless, fearful, sometimes bound or chained and was expanded into computer games and animated videos.

She said it here.

See… I… Look… Thing is, if you’re a real man what possible problem could you possibly have with relationships — sexual, social, marital, or otherwise — with real women? What conceivable reason could one ever have for preferring sex with a child (helpless, fearful, virginal, or otherwise) instead of a grown woman with all her faculties? [Note: Or for those inclined to shotacons, a grown man. —fl]

Seriously!

For all that I advocate for the end of masculinity, I always have and always will enjoy my extraordinarily lusty heterosexuality[**]. And when I say I’m a reluctant but sincere monogamist I’m sincere about the reluctance part. But I’m just saying that if I started making a list of the women I could imagine spending an afternoon, or a weekend, and/or a lifetime with, from fellow bloggers to fellow commenters online to friends new and old to acquaintances to erstwhile co-workers, bosses, employees, teachers, fellow students, or trainees, to doctors and nurses, paralegals, lawyers and judges (ok, only one judge so far), UPS drivers, baristas, coaches, teammates, in-laws, and camp-mates I might use up every pen and wear down every pencil in the house and yet… I just don’t see much room there for non-adults.

And for once I’m not talking out of my usual disquiet about all the ways adult interference can disrupt children’s normal sexual development and lead to their inability to appreciate all the varieties of real sex throughout the rest of their long, long lives. Nor am I asking out of moral outrage, parental concern about my children, nor fastidious adherence to legal ages of majority, emancipation, or consent. Those would all be expressions of concern for “lolicon” and “shoticon” children.

Instead, at the moment, I’m concerned about the men and women (don’t be a dope, of course there are surprising numbers of both) who for whatever reasons imagine that sexual attraction to those who are not yet peers — let alone children who might be “naked, helpless, fearful, sometimes bound or chained…” is anything but an admission of their own infirmity, their own inadequacy, their own miserably insecure unpreparedness.

Yes, yes, I know it’s somehow supposed to be manly. And yes, yes, in some cultures heaven is supposed to be filled with perpetual virgins (doesn’t that sound far more half-empty, or empty outright, than half-full?) And yes, yes, some cultures neither stigmatize nor traumatize children’s sexuality. Let’s just say, then, that unless such societies give adult members no, zero, none choice and require them to have sex with inexperienced children rather than adults, then in both those cultures and any others it’s fair game to ask what possible motivation grownups might have for choosing, let alone preferring, not merely “barely legal” but barely pubescent children for sex partners.

[** Near as I can tell, as social constructions go neither masculinity nor femininity have much to do with heterosexuality. In fact, considering the constraints they impose I think one could make a nice case that the constraints of femininity and masculinity interfere mightily with both heterosexuality and lust. —fl]