Consenting Adults

So, as I said earlier, I'm reading this book by Richard Evans, The Third Reich in Power: 1933-1939. I've just finished a section where the Nazis are going after the various religious orders in Germany, trying to stamp out anything that constituted an alternative center of power.

Anyways, they went after the Catholic minority, and one of the ways they tried to weaken and discredit the Church was to print lurid accounts of priests sexual abuse of boys. And, well, what with all the recent notoriety on this subject, it was hard to muster much sympathy for the Catholic Church on this subject.

But then, Evans started talking about how the Nazis started to try to indoctrinate the population towards their own ideology, through various groups. An important institution for youth indoctrination was the Hitler Youth. Evans describes it as a very top-down, rigid, bullying, stupid organization, and I've no reason to doubt him. And, relevant to the discussion on child-molesting Catholic priests, it seems that some of the lumpish thugs who led Hitler Youth clubs weren't opposed to doing a little child-abuse themselves. Not surprisingly, the Nazi regime didn't print lurid accounts of this rampant problem in the government press.

There was also the tragic account of some Hitler Youth members whose bullying of another lad ended up becoming sexual abuse, which then led to knifing the boy to death to prevent his accusing them later. When the boy's mother complained, she was arrested to keep the whole story covered up. (Anecdotes like that make you wonder why we bother asking what purpose we were put on this planet for, don't they? Like, what was that boy's "mission in life" supposed to be? Ah, I get depressed.)

So, yeah, the Church molested kids, the Hitler Youth molested kids. The Nazis made a big deal that one of the Brownshirt SA's was found in bed with another male during the "Night of the Long Knives." And then there's the stories about how Hitler had his cousin urinate and defecate on him, before having her killed when her ability to keep quiet about it came into doubt.

It seems that there's a lot of stuff going on, all the time. We're a pretty fucked-up set of animals, twisting our mammalian sexual urges into all sorts of crazy shapes. Repression only turns us into complete psychos, like Ted Haggard or the Taliban. It seems to me that we should all stop trying to believe that sexuality is an "evil" (one of the reasons why I hate that word "evil" is because it is so utterly useless as a descriptor) and look at it for what it is: a means of reproduction that also has loads of side benefits [no doubt thrown in so that we'll eagerly pursue it] and that can manifest itself in ways that sometimes have little to do with the act of reproduction but with something else altogether.

The sexual urge isn't a completely innocuous, wonderful, unproblematic thing that's been deformed by religious repression. Unrestrained, it can lead people to force their sexuality on others, and it can lead people to use others solely to gratify it.

But we can usually restrain all our other appetites so that we're not being greedy, selfish, hurtful, destructive, towards others. If sexual urges are shared between consenting adults, that is, human beings in an equal-enough power relationship, then it seems to me that if anything comes to mind that upon a little honest reflection isn't destructive, then go to it.

[I've spent over an hour on this post looking for decent links. You'd think there'd be something from a respectable source (as opposed to some bushloving right-wing propaganda site) about sexual repression under the Taliban, ... evidently not.]

So that's my post for the day.