Stephen Roney's Blog, page 109

Fair-Haired Boys

 

I have written recently my speculations about what turned my mentally-retarded Uncle “Tom” into a bisexual pedophile. I have traced it back through circumstantial evidence to my Uncle Teddy as prime suspect. Both are dead, so I trust there is no harm now in speaking openly.

But there was another child who might have been involved. My father. Call him Terry. He was at least two years younger than Teddy, at least one year older than Tom. Was he aware of what was going on? Was he affected?

There is no obvious sign of it. If Ted’s bachelorhood suggests homosexuality, Terry’s life suggests the reverse. He married and had five children. As far as I can tell, he was always faithful to my mother. He never disappeared for an evening, unless it was for a Rotary Club meeting. Perfectly conventional.

Yet it is improbable that he was oblivious to it all. And I have again some circumstantial evidence that he was involved.

Back in his early adolescence, my brother was caught with a little book titled Sex for One: a manual of masturbation. Not abnormal for his age; I had a copy of Southern and Hoffenberg’s Candy hidden in my own drawers at about that time. It too was found, and confiscated; but the only feedback I heard was that my mother had read it. She gave no review.

But our father really seemed upset with my brother about that book. He ragged on him quite a bit, as if to humiliate him.

This was strange.

It was not for moral reasons. My father was no sexual prude nor moralist. When, in earlier childhood, he was given reports of his sons and daughter exposing themselves to one another in the attic, he said nothing and did nothing. He did not seem to care. When his wife and children, and the next-door neighbour, complained that his brother, Uncle Tom, was molesting the children, he said nothing and did nothing.

In fact, at around the same time he found the book in my brother’s room, he was advising us, his three adolescent sons, that we should learn the ropes by having sex with our mother, or with our older married cousin, then living with us. And he advised us in a rudimentary way how to seduce a woman: you play soft music, and avoid being too obvious about it. He seemed to be coaching us, and indeed trying to tempt us. 

He got no takers, though. I doubt he ran the notion by our mother or our cousin.

Most of us have a natural revulsion to incest. Evolution instills this, to preserve the species from a shrinking gene pool.

Our father, whether he acted on it or not, clearly did not have any sense that incest was repulsive. In fact, his advice to us suggests he thought it was, on the whole, preferable to exogamy. 

The one thing, I posit, that might override this natural aversion to incest is if your first sexual encounter is incestuous. Then you are imprinted by the natural monogamy of our species with the sense that this is the proper way to have sex.

This might even explain his loyalty to our mother. It was clearly not on grounds of sexual morality or the marriage vow: he was shopping her out. But a taste for incest would flip the drive for exogamy into a drive for endogamy, and so support monogamy. If initially foreign to the family, her continued presence, in time almost like a sister, may have made her automatically sexually preferable to other women.

So it looks as though our father’s earliest sexual experiences, like Tom’s, must have been incestuous. Otherwise he would realize how gross he was sounding.

When we boys were still quite young, he gathered us for the talk on the birds and the bees. Oddly, he did this not at home, but during a visit to our grandparents. (Dr. Freud, call your office. Did being in his parents’ home make him think of such matters?) There was no talk of sexual morality, of monogamy or waiting until marriage. It was more about how wonderful sex is. He omitted any mention of venereal disease.

He did pull out his penis and show it to us—not very sexually inhibited of him.

Why did he do this? Surely it was not required for educational purposes; we all had our own dangly bits, and knew what one looked like. 

A feminist might suggest this was a power move, a man “waving his penis around.” But in my experience, men never do that in front of other men. Perhaps in front of a woman. Surveys show most men are insecure about the size of their flaccid penis. 

But then again, this was not, as I recall, a flaccid penis. It looked as though it was at least semi-erect.

Which suggests he was doing it for sexual pleasure, and further had some homosexual and pedophilic impulses. Would most men feel comfortable taking out their penis to show it to young boys? If they did, would they be likely to get an erection?

And now, if it was not for moral reasons, why did my father take exception to my brother’s book, Sex for One? Why, if all the rest of this was fine with him, was he so opposed to masturbation?

He wasn’t.

My father took exception to the book, Sex for One, not because it was about masturbation, but because, he said, it was about homosexuality. He said it meant that my brother was becoming a homosexual. I don’t recall the exact word he used. It was not “homosexual,” and it was not “gay.” That word was not in common use. 

Why would he automatically connect masturbation with homosexuality? 

It seemed to make no sense.

Yet, given how the human body is built, male homosexual sex requires mutual masturbation: first Bert brings Ernie to orgasm, then Ernie returns the favour, by some form of artificial stimulation.

That this was our father’s sole and immediate association suggests a strong familiarity with homosexual sex. It would not have occurred to me; or, I think, to most.

Does this mean he was opposed to homosexuality, or to my brother being a homosexual? Not necessarily—though he would not be the first closet gay who tried to project his own “fault” onto others. The point might just as well have been to convince my brother that he already was a homosexual. Plant the seed and see if it develops.

Most tellingly, perhaps, in helping to identify where this came from, my father also showed exactly the same preference for blonde hair we saw in Uncle Tom. He married a blonde woman. He blatantly favoured his blonde sons and daughter over the browns—something I think we all noticed, in our way. He put heavy pressure on both blonde sons to live nearby and go into business with him; which would have him see them daily. “Fair-haired boy,” meaning someone arbitrarily favoured, was even one of his pet expressions. Granted that it was a fairly familiar idiom at about the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries; but not that common. In my father’s time, I never heard anyone else use it. It seemed to speak to him in some way.

For what it is worth, my father had dark hair. He was not referring to himself admiringly, then, but to some external object of his affection. 

Uncle Ted, as previously noted, had blonde hair.

Ted probably experimented on his younger brother Terry as well as on little Tom. In either case, it had more or less the same effect. The only difference was that Terry, unlike Tom, had a social life, and was able to marry. He therefore felt less need to act out his less conventional urges--so far as I can tell.

The moral of this story is not that we must suppress homosexuality specifically. I do not hold with Freud that suppression is out of the question; but it is a heavy burden on some, imposed on them through no fault of their own. It is not even that we must suppress incest, or pedophilia, although we must. It is that we must stop viewing other people as objects, there for our pleasure, sexual or otherwise. Other people, as Kant explains, must be seen as ends, not means. They are to be treated, as Martin Luther King explains, with the respect due to the content of their character, not according to the colour of their skin or the colour of their hair or their age or their sex or their physical attractiveness, or supposed ownership because they are our children or our siblings. 

If my speculations are correct—and some of the evidence is certain--Tom, Ted, and Terry all failed this test.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Just Sayin'

 

Death is beautiful. Death is your friend.

You know what’s funny? If the Trudeau government planned to create a Fascist dictatorship, they would be doing exactly what they have been doing over the past few years. Buying out the established media. Refusing to allow other reporters at their press conferences. Imposing censorship on the internet to silence independent voices—Bill C-11. Shutting down peaceful protest with aggressive police force. Freezing the bank accounts of those who supported it, even in a minor way. Briefly, but an abject warning against any thoughts of organized opposition in future. Trying to force everyone to carry an app on their phone, allowing them to be tracked at all times. Going after truckers and farmers, the two groups most difficult to control—because of their mobility and self-sustainability. The sudden shift in Ontario at least to voting machines, which have proven so problematic in the US. The introduction and expansion of assisted suicide, giving government power to kill, perhaps ridding society of what Hitler called "life undeserving of life." Now the plan to ban almost all firearms under the guise of “assault rifles.” 

Funny too how it is now forbidden to speak in public of conspiracies. “Spreading conspiracy theories” is now justification to have you silenced or banned online.

Heck, that almost looks like some conspiracy is at foot. Otherwise, what’s the problem?

We even know of a number of strange activities lately that almost look like conspiracies. The Balenciaga ad promoting child predation. The La Maison Simons ad promoting suicide, and actually featuring the blue whale image used by online serial killers. The mystery of Epstein’s island, his client list, and his assisted suicide. The suppression of information on the laboratory origins of the COVID virus, the strange government resistance to talk of possible treatments, the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story; the “Russia hoax,”… Frogs really were being turned gay.

If you were a conspiracy theorist, you’d almost think there was something going on here.

It’s all an amazing set of coincidences.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Ye on Alex Jones

 Okay, everybody, it's time to leave Kanye West alone. 

He's going through a divorce and losing his family. 

That's what this is all about. 

Cut the guy some slack and ignore everything he says for now.

If you've ever been through this, you know.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

'Tis the Season

 

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

A Moving Analysis

 

Everyone should probably hear this.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Uncle Tom

 

Don't ask, don't tell

My mentally-retarded uncle was a bisexual pedophile. 

He is dead now; surely there is no harm in talking about it. 

To my knowledge, he molested one niece, three nephews, and a little girl next door. They say that pedophiles cannot reform; if true, I assume there were more. The family knew about it, but nothing was ever done about it.

His being a pedophile was predictable. He was always kept at home, never put in contact with other mentally-retarded people. He had no social life. He must have had sexual urges, as we all do. Where was he going to express them?

He harassed my mother, but that was not going to get him anywhere.

That sheer necessity explains his instincts jumping the fence against molesting children. Most of us would not be so tempted.

Yet, little girls being available, it does not explain jumping the second fence into homosexuality. 

By the reports I heard, he also seemed in his molestations to show some knowledge of gay sexual technique.

Being mentally retarded, and mostly sequestered, before the Internet, where did this come from?

If, as I posit in a previous posting, homosexual urges come from earliest sexual experiences, he must have been sexualized to this himself in early adolescence. And, given that he was kept away from any wider society, it seems to have come from someone inside the home—although some neighbourhood predator cannot be entirely ruled out.

He did not molest all his nephews, although all were more or less equally within his reach. He seemed to have a taste for blondes. All but one of those he did molest were quite fair of hair; so was the neighbour girl. The one dark-haired nephew he troubled with seems not to have been a favourite--he was left out of the will which Uncle Tom eventually somehow got drawn up. Others seemed to be rewarded in proportion to their perceived attractiveness. Not their cooperation, not their being “nice” to him. One of the biggest behests was to his sister-in-law, my mother, who always rejected his advances and avoided him whenever possible.

So it seems he would dally with a brunette in a pinch, but did not think much of them. Perhaps with my swarthy brother, it was just a one-night stand.

From this, we actually may have a portrait of the predator who sexualized the poor old guy. A male with blonde hair. With ready access.

Awkwardly enough, I have another uncle. Call him Teddy. For a time, he was an alcoholic, although he later, admirably, straightened himself out. He was at least three years older than Tom. He had blonde hair. He never married.

The fact that he didn’t marry is not, of course, proof that he was gay. He had girlfriends. If short of stature, with delicate features, he was a handsome man. He must have had many opportunities. I myself saw women flirt with him. At least a couple of times, he had a fiancée. But something always happened just before the wedding. 

Why did he never marry? Some men don’t; but it is a natural urge.

Teddy became an alcoholic by late adolescence. Again, why did he resort to escapism so early? What was troubling him?

It is suggestive. If he had gay urges, being gay was not okay in the 1940s; and with a strictly Catholic mother.  There were no obvious outlets. One had to keep it closeted. If some part of him were gay, no surprise if we never heard about it.

But what if you had a mentally retarded little brother around the house? He wouldn’t know enough to resist. He wouldn’t be easily able to complain to anyone; he wouldn’t dare tell his mother, even if he could understand. Boys experiment even at the best of times.

Getting drunk first might make it all easier.

I wonder. I speculate. They are both dead. Much damage has probably been done. And the truth died with them.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Was That Your Mother That I Saw You With Last Night?

 

Freud with phallic symbol.

According to Sigmund Freud, we all have a suppressed desire to have sex with our Mum. Or our father, if we are on the female side of the binary. And the evidence is that we tend to marry someone who physically resembles our parent of the opposite sex.

Except, no. Not me. My mother was short and blonde. I married two women, both with black hair. Both were taller than average, at least for their community. The thought of sex with a women who closely resembles my mother actually provokes feelings of disgust.

And what about those other Caucasian men taking Asian wives? Or those girls who for centuries have run off with the visiting sailor or the Italian piano teacher?

In fact, evolution should select for exogamy, and seems to. Similar genes are bad for the species: higher chance of a harmful mutation. So we instinctively desire someone unlike ourselves, or our parent, in appearance, and are instinctively repelled by incest. This is why opposites attract.

So when we have a strong sexual preference, like a preference for red hair, or for black men, where does it come from?

To some extent, no doubt, from this instinct for exogamy. But that does not seem enough. Either red hair or black hair would be fully different from my mother’s blonde hair. So why do I prefer black to red? Either Asian men or African men would be fully different in appearance from a European father; so why do North American women so often favour African men specifically?

I think we know why. When we hear of a fetish, we do often assume it comes from one’s first sexual experience. It has to do with the first person with whom you achieved orgasm. You see a woman with black hair, a check mark in the back of your mind. A little taller than average. Check. Foreign. Check. Approach with interest.

Humans are hardwired to be monogamous. We can posit this from evolution. Human children take a lot of time and investment to develop. Monogamy, two parents staying together, is the inevitable evolutionary strategy to preserve and advance the species. And so, as soon as we first have sex, we are imprinted, like a baby duck when it hatches and first sees its Mom.

Of course, we are not beings of instinct, like ducks. It is not that obvious, and can be superseded by other concerns. But a switch is tripped. We are meant to be with that first one for the rest of our lives.

When we recognize this, we can recognize the grave harm of the sexual revolution. We recognize why all societies but our own put a high value on female virginity. If your wife has had sex with someone else, you will always be number two. The bond and the commitment will never be complete. Sex for you or her will never be what it is supposed to be.

This is equally true for men, at least in emotional terms; but for men, there is no good way to tell. Men have no hymen.

Surely this is why evolution has produced the hymen; it is mildly dangerous, and painful. It seems to perform no other function. It is there as a seal and certification.

This also explains the traditional prohibition in most societies on homosexual sex.

We have been told gays are “born this way”; but this is evolutionarily impossible. Since homosexuals, barring exceptional measures, do not breed, a gay gene would be bred out in one or two generations.

No, people must become gay because their first orgasm was with some member of the same sex.

Older gays face extremely limited choices in sex partners. Ninety-eight percent of all adults who might appeal to you will reject your advance, perhaps angrily. That must be tough. The obvious strategy is to seduce some young person. A young person will not be fully aware of what is going on, and may not struggle. If they are repulsed, or complain, at least until recent years, nobody is likely to listen. If they listen, a young person may not understand well enough to lodge any complaints. They may even feel too guilty, not understanding what has happened.

The genetic programming to be attracted instead and only to the opposite sex must be quite strong. Evolution would make it so. Most of us are repulsed, not in the least attracted, to the thought of sex with another man or another woman. But if the first sexual encounters are with a same-sex partner, you now have another instinct, a sexual imprint, pulling you in the opposite direction. The longer and more intimate the initial relationship, the more likely the gay urge is to stay and grow.

Wise societies will therefore condemn homosexual sex, and perhaps pass laws against it. Homosexuality is contagious, every new gay means children not born, and that polis will decline over time.

And few citizens will want their own children to be made homosexual, for it means their own family line ends.

So where did Freud get the opposite idea, that people usually marry someone who resembles their parent? For he does not assume this, he cites it as evidence.

It must be from his patients.

Neurotic people, then, at least in upper class Victorian Vienna, are likely to violate a basic instinct for exogamy, and marry someone like their parents.

If this can only be caused by their first orgasmic experience, this suggests that people become neurotic because their parents made incestuous advances on them in childhood or adolescence.

This flips Freud’s idea of the Oedipus complex. It is not that Sonny wants to do it with Mum. It’s that Mum has done it, like it or not, with Sonny.

This was in fact Freud’s original assumption, his “seduction theory”: mental illness came parents who used their own children for their sexual pleasure. He claimed for years to find memories of this in every single case who came to his office.

Then he swapped the seduction theory suddenly for the “Oedipus complex,” without much explanation. He said he was simply too horrified by the implications. He decided the sex must have been purely imaginary. If imaginary, coming from the child, not the parent.

Looks like he was right the first time.

Not, I think, that this stands as the direct cause of all mental illness. Rather, mental illness is caused by a parent who sees their child as an object, there for the parent’s benefit. It is caused by a lack of parental love. Incest is one likely consequence. Emotional abuse is another: kick the family dog to make yourself feel better.

Incest is presumably not natural to the parents of the mentally ill any more than to us. But if you are sufficiently depraved, your own child is always available as a sex object, after all. This may have been more important in Victorian Vienna, where eager sex partners outside of marriage were thinner on the ground.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Ye and Hitler on Alex Jones

 

Kanye West just went on Alex Jones and said he saw good things in Hitler. After all, "There's some good in everybody." And the Jews were not going to stop him from saying so. We have to stop demonizing the Nazis.

Two points: first, this is not a reasonable position. This is where moral relativism and non-judgemental New Age "Christianity" takes us, and it is a dark path. Hitler had the potential to be good, but he chose evil, and did not repent.

And antisemitism is, to me, a litmus test of good and evil. It almost seems as though God assigned the Jews this role among the nations. 

People who know Kanye West insist he is not saying this because he is manic. I don't think this makes a difference. Manic people, insane people of any sort, are still morally responsible for their moral judgments.

Should Kanye West -- Ye -- be punished in some way? No. Freedom of speech and freedom of thought prohibits that.

But we should all publicly express our strong disagreement.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

The Need to Counter Trump's Lies

 

The Guardian, more often fondly known as the Grauniad for the quality of their copyediting and proofing, has proposed using a “truth sandwich” whenever reporting on Trump. That is, they report the truth, then report what Trump said, then repeat the truth, which presumably contradicts him.

Friend Xerxes, uncharacteristically for a leftist, objects. The problem is, he is a trained and experienced journalist. 

And the Grauniad proposal is a brazen violation of journalistic ethics.

All politicians lie; it comes with the job. The job of a journalist, on the other hand, is to doubt everyone. It is deeply corrupt that a journalist would treat Trump differently than other politicians. We rely on reporters to report, not comment. Opinon is for the editorial page.

The proper approach, of course, if some controversial assertion is made, is to seek and quote a spokesperson from the other side. It is not permissible for the referee to stride to the centre of the ring in the middle of a round and throw a sucker punch.

Sophie Zeldin-O'Neill, the editor recommending the practice, asks otherwise “how to responsibly cover him [Trump] without unwittingly providing the coverage he so expertly manipulates.”

Strip that partial sentence down to plain language: “how to cover Trump without giving him coverage.” In other words, how, as a journalist, to do your job without doing your job.

She laments that Trump tries to use media to his advantage. Just like every other successful politician or campaign manager who ever lived. And every successful company or organization of any kind. If he does it better than others, that warrants admiration, not subversion. 

Xerxes ponders one possible cause for this wholesale abandonment of journalistic ethics. That it is necessary because we now live in “a time when a lie could go viral. When a single inaccurate assertion could go without contradiction to 7.62 billion smart phones.”

We do not live in such a time. Our time is the opposite: a world in which no statement any longer can go forth without risking contradiction by 7.62 private individuals with smart phones, each of which gives them a printing press, a broadcasting studio, and a 7.62 billion-person reach. Lies can no longer go halfway the world, as Mark Twain once lamented, before the truth could get its boots on. Now the truth will show up within seconds; it will be the next triumphant tweet.

The Nazi success with their “big lie” technique depended on being able to control the media. That is no longer possible; although big tech companies and governments are fighting a rearguard action.

So why the unprecedented need to police Trump’s speech? It cannot be because he lies. It can only be because he speaks the truth.

But the attempt to silence him is surely doomed to fail. Truth can no longer be suppressed by silencing any one man. Governments and big tech are trying so hard they are getting blatant, as in this Guardian piece, about it. There are too many smart phones out there. People now hear and see immediately, for example, the riots in Guangdong or Shiraz.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

What I Know about What Is Happening in China

 

I teach some Chinese students by distance. I get a hint of what is going on there. One student says that others at his school are posting things critical of the government online. He is afraid to write an assigned essay on “the effects of Covid.” He feels it might be too “politically sensitive,” and I must substitute a different topic.

The odds, no doubt, are that the Chinese government will survive this upheaval. But if they do not, it will change the direction of the world. It seems that other governments everywhere have been looking to the Chinese model and seeking to emulate their “basic dictatorship.” Just as years ago, everyone was looking to Japan for their economic model. It would change everything, and for the better, if the Chinese system were suddenly shown, like Japan’s economy, to hit a wall.

Mankind’s hopes, for the moment, are on the shoulders of the people of China.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.