You may have run across an image macro going around the internet recently featuring a picture of YouTube ranter and sometime Men’s Rights ally The Amazing Atheist – aka Terroja or TJ Kinkaid – and an appalling quote, supposedly from him, arguing that MRAs should campaign to lower the age of consent, because “[n]ature already has an age of consent. That age is approximately 12-13, otherwise known as the onset of puberty.”
I didn’t post about the quote, appalling as it is, because I couldn’t find any proof that Mr. Kincaid actually wrote or said it; I even searched several of Mr. Kincaid’s books and a document entitled “The Somewhat Complete Ravings of TJ Kincaid” to no avail. Apparently no one else has been able to find the quote either.
If this quote was fabricated, I’m a little puzzled as to why, because Kincaid has actually said very similar things before. Given the confusion about the quote, I thought it might be worth noting what we know he has said on the topic.
In a 2006 posting on a Marilyn Manson fan site, linked to in RationalWiki’s profile of him, a self-identified “atheist libertarian” calling himself Terroja argued that
Having pedophilic attractions doesn’t mean you automatically go out and start molesting kids. From the time I was 14 to the time I was about 19, I used to have extreme pedophilic fantasies, and I somehow managed to never even come close to acting on them. I think with my brain, not my penis.
I do think, however, the pedophilia is unfairly persecuted in today’s society.
I think the difference in punishment between child rapists and child molestors should be more significant, with molestors perhaps simply attending mandatory therapy for their first offense. I also think that the age of sexual consent should be lowered to 12 or 13.
My stance is not designed to be controversial or to offend anyone. I only want human beings to understand that the law must work within the parameters of human nature, not in defiance of it.
In a recent posting on his blog, Kincaid admits that this indeed is something he once believed:
The age of consent thing is based on a post I made on an internet forum when I was like 20. And it was actually a pretty popular sentiment on the boards at that time. Hell, it was a popular sentiment on the internet in general at that time. It was also, I’m sad to say, an opinion that my father held.
After experiencing another decade on planet earth, I realize how horribly misguided that opinion was and is. I think that maybe it’s not so horrible for kids that age to begin sexual exploration with one another, but it’s definitely wrong for an adult to engage is sex with someone that young and inexperienced.
The “everyone else was a pedophile in 2006” argument is not exactly a convincing one, and it’s worth noting that Kincaid “confessed” his attraction towards underage girls in his self-published 2007 book “Scumbag: Musings of a Subhuman” as well, writing that
I think 14-year-old girls are hot. (Yeah, so does everyone else, but I actually admit it)
That’s what pedophiles would like to believe, but it’s not actually true.
Also, in “The Somewhat Complete Ravings of TJ Kincaid,” which seems to be a compilation of writings from several of his books, we find the following passage:
Teenage girls are annoying because they go out into public dressed like sluts and then if you look at their massive titties there is a segment of our society that will happily declare you a pedophile for “oggling those poor children.” Children, my ass. Children don’t have D cups. Children don’t have big, luscious round asses crammed into designer jeans.
For what it’s worth, the word is “ogling,” not “oggling.”
Even more troubling than these quotes is the fact that Kincaid also claimed at one point that he “dated” a 14-year-old when he was 23.
In his recent posting, he insists that he was only joking:
As for this nonsense about me dating a 14-year-old when I was 23, I was actually mocking a friend of mine who was over 30 and was macking on some 16-year-old girl. The sad fact is that when I was 23, I was single and pussyless. And I was too timid and frightened to even approach a girl sexually, let alone one who could wind me up in prison.
I have no trouble believing that he was lying about having an underage girlfriend, but his explanation doesn’t seem to jibe with what he – or someone claiming to be him – said in the very strange (and not altogether safe for work) video that seems to be the source for what Kincaid calls this “rumor” about him.
Roughly 30 minutes into the video, which shows a live BlogTV session between YouTube personality thefakesagan and some guests in an internet chatroom, we see someone identified as theamazingatheist declare flatly in the chat session that “as a 23-year-old I dated a 14-year-old briefly.”
When the expletive-spewing thefakesagan asks him what it was that led him to stop “dating” the 14-year-old so quickly, theamazingatheist replies “fear of her dad murdering me,” adding in a followup comment that “he was a Marine, actually.”
When the host, burping and fiddling with a bass guitar, asks theamazingatheist if he actually felt “an emotional bond with this 14-year-old bitch,” themazingatheist replies “I felt an emotional bond with her pussy.”
“Sorry,” he types a few moments later, “I’m a sociopath, useless in the ways of love.”
The host then spends a few moments fumbling with his instrument, trying ineptly to work out the bassline to Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.” “You better run, you better do what you’re told,” he sings, “TJ’s in the back room fucking a 14-year-old.”
The conversation moves on, and I think I will too.
But now that I’ve gotten hold of some of TJ’s masterworks, I think I’ll have to see what else is hiding within them. I suspect I’ll be posting about that shortly.
saphy, I’m just reading about NAMBLA – I’d heard the acronym before but didn’t know what it meant. Fucking sickening, and as for the ACLA defending them on a goddamn technicality in the Curley case …
Paglia. ::snorts:: I don’t think I’ve ever believed that shit-eater was a feminist.
Has anyone seen that horrible documentary Netflix picked up for some reason, Are All Men Pedophiles?
Same bullshit. “It’s okay to prey on underage girls because all men want to.” EvoPsych, teen porn, blah blah blah. I couldn’t make it through the whole thing, but I’m guessing they did not end up attempting to describe the experience for the victim (sorry, “underage partner”). Of course not. What the dicks want, the dicks get.
And I think it’s no accident that these arguments pop up in the Manosphere with some regularity. They use exactly the same justifications for desires they think they shouldn’t have to control. “B-but how are we supposed to not rape/demean/doxx/vilify women when they are just there, living their lives in public, in their bodies?”
I see plenty of teenage girls emerging from my daughter’s school on a daily basis, and I genuinely don’t fancy any of them – and I equally genuinely can’t fathom what I’d get out of any kind of sexual liaison with them. Not least because I prefer my partners to know what they’re doing and to be able to articulate what they want from me.
But then sex for me is a far more complicated and emotionally/sensually involved process than just sticking my dick into someone. Largely because I’m a mature adult.
Camile Paglia supports child sexual abuse? But she’s an anti-feminist! Everyone knows that anti-feminists are obviously opposed to sexual abuse. Gosh, what’s wrong with feminists being suspicious of anti-feminists by default? Such irrational ideologues.
I find it fascinating that in MRA land the average man will supposedly turn into a rapist upon being exposed to a member of the opposite sex who’s even barely pubescent, and yet men still be dominant in every sphere. And they think women commit all the crime in the world, so who should be running the world? Children, robots, people from Real Life? Or maybe whatever planet “Brights” come from.
Who should be running the world?
The Furrinati.
Except they really do already, but don’t tell the scrotosphericals that.
I’ve never liked Camille Paglia. And now I regret not being at home today. I have a book of Ginsberg’s that I won as a prize in a regional high school journalism contest. I’ve looked past his sketchiness in the past because I’ve treasured the memory of winning that competition and wanted to keep it. Now I know about the NAMBLA thing, I think where I want to keep Ginsberg’s book is the trash can.
Sounds like just the book for a shredder.
Well, one thing’s for sure…the internet is permanent.
I’m not going to go back and wade through all of the discussion, but I do hate the fact that we don’t have a word in the English language to describe someone who likes children but is not sexually attracted to them. Or even its obverse. My ex was not a fan of children — pedophobe is probably a good neologism. On the other hand, I genuinely like children (in small “uncle-sized” doses).
Pedophile is, I think, an egregiously bad word to describe what’s going on here, because “love” (the ‘phile’ part of that word) is NOT what we’re talking about. Pedophiles don’t “love” children. They use children.
It is, however, the only word we’ve got, whether we use it in a colloquial or a formal-psychodiagnostic sense. Because there’s no word for “user of children” in the lexicon.
Perhaps you can make a nice bonfire.
The Furrinati are better world controllers than some white as snow ten year old twins I know of.
Why am I suddenly thinking about this comic: http://www.onipress.com/title/i-was-the-cat *confused stare*
Not that I know much about Ginsberg, but this is why you shouldn’t have heroes, kids. They’ll only break your heart.
That book cover is perfect, Malitia. Furrinati world domination!
Makes me think about that whole Zimmer-Bradley awfulness again. Should I burn those books of hers that I have because she was actually an awful human being? What about the fact that her daughter, in revealing her abuse, also emphasised the positive impact that her mother had had on individuals within the community of sci fi and fantasy writers? Does that make reading her books actually ok? Or is her daughter’s blessing upon her mother’s written works just not enough to make up for what that woman did to children?
So ethically confused. 🙁
For me, unless that positive good was something on the level of saving lives, it wouldn’t come close to balancing with the atrocious things ZB did. Mind you I wouldn’t have to make the call, because I couldn’t stand Mists of Avalon and chucked it out years ago.
@cassandrakitty:
I’m not an expert, but it seems to me like a sexual attraction to prepubescent children is inherently a paraphilia. It may be that people have sexually abused children without experiencing sexual attraction, and hence “don’t have a paraphilia,” but I can’t tell if that’s what you mean. If they’re actually attracted to children, I’d call that a paraphilia.
kittehserf: It is a comic about a Furrinati overlord in the quite literal sense. He spent most of his lives trying to take over the world (occasionally with quite ruthless methods) and now is letting the main character writing his memoirs. This is the internetz we are cat worshipers already. :3
By TAA logic, a 13 year old with a D cup is more mature than a 33 year old with an A cup. It makes no sense whatsoever. I know misogynists like to see us as no more than a walking pair of breasts but in actuality there isn’t a connection between brain power and maturity and breast size.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, when my breasts first got big at age 16 I saw a tabloid that said there was a study “proving” that large breasted women were less intelligent than small breasted women. So began my introduction to that stereotype, which I would experience many, many more times. Yay body shaming!
You have to factor in the misogyny aspect. If you have no interest in a mutual relationship, intelligent conversation, shared responsibility, or any of that, then all women with breasts and hips are interchangeable with each other (but not with girls who don’t have secondary sex characteristics yet).
Language evolves over time, and in common usage “pedophile” now means something like “a person who commits, or who openly expresses a desire to commit, crimes related to sexual activity with minors.”
So the people who are wasting time are the ones who say we can’t call those people pedophiles when they clearly are.
Also: The word “literally” can be used to add emphasis to a figurative statement: “He literally hit the ceiling”. The phrase “I could care less” is meant ironically and should be interpreted as “I don’t care at all.” “They” can be used as a singular pronoun for a person of unknown or unspecified gender: “Somebody left their keys in the lobby.” Oxford commas are a matter of personal preference and you can use them or not, as long as you’re consistent across the document. Arguing about any of this is a waste of time. I think that’s everything…
Almost off topic, but I have a friend whose father punched Alan Ginsberg in the stomach. He was a huge fan, saw him in a bar, walked up to him to say, “hey, I’m a big fan of your work”, and Ginsberg gave him this snooty, really belittling dismissal and called him “little boy”. So he socked him.
I don’t condone violence usually, but god do I fucking hate Alan Ginsberg.
This hits pretty close to home for a number of reasons. I’ve got Many Thoughts on this subject so I’m going to split it up to avoid wall-of-text issues.
(Content note: sexual abuse)
Recently, I’ve been in a situation that has put me face-to-face with sexual abuse cases. It’s been pretty rough, but a couple of the situations are relevent here.
A teenager accused her stepfather of molesting her repeatedly over several years. After the most recent rape, she apparently decided she had had enough and went to the police. When the stepfather was interviewed by the police, he denied having done anything. When the police mentioned that they had obtained DNA evidence from the most recent case, he admitted that it was “probably his” because he did have sex with his 14 year old stepdaughter.
His justification was that he was drunk mistook her for her mother.
The fact that he thought this was a reasonable defense was, in itself, upsetting to me. How does that work? At what point are you so drunk that you can’t tell the difference between a 14 year old girl and a 40 year old woman?
Given the medical evidence, his statement really boiled down to “I thought it was my wife I was raping”
Rape culture is alive and well. Thankfully, the police didn’t buy his excuses.
I feel like the “estrus means consent-capable” argument is a close relative to “somebody involved was drunk so it doesn’t count”.
I keep coming across the argument that the child sexual abuse statistics are overreported because “many of those are “15 and 16 year olds who have chosen to become prostitutes of their own free will”
I recently met some of those 15 and 16 year olds. Spoiler alert: they were still very much children, and “of their own free will” meant “coerced into it by 30 year old ‘boyfriends’ who gave them drugs, refused to feed them, and held their possessions hostage'”
So yeah, they weren’t grabbed from their homes and put in chains and forced to have sex for money at gunpoint. That still doesn’t mean that they made the decision without coercion and with full knowledge of the consequences involved.