⚠Content Warning: Discussion of Sexual Violence, Sexual Coercion, Child Sexual Assault, Rape Apologia, Pedophilia (Non-Graphic)
…the struggle for youth liberation […] ultimately does not have anything to do with the freedom of adults to gratify their aggrieved sense of entitlement to sex with young bodies.
Excerpt:
The general point is that the following arguments were written in a quite different atmosphere, when anarchists were on the defense against cheap anti-youth-liberation strawman arguments from the non-anarchist left. The reason I feel they’re worth repeating anyway is because the radical politics of youth liberation they sought to articulate, a politics largely absent from leftist thinking, seem to have been lost in the noise. As you will notice, each of the arguments are constructed in response to accusations and insinuations that youth liberationists want to “normalize pedophilia,” or “abolish the age of consent.” (Which you will recognize as the exact right wing accusation upon which “groomer” rhetoric turns.)
The arguments below are messy and incomplete, with some components repeated between them, and many important points left out. They have been edited for clarity and in some parts expanded or revised. But I hope they can help re-center the freedom of youth from coercive control, manipulation, authority, and exploitation by adults as the meaning of the struggle for youth liberation, which ultimately does not have anything to do with the freedom of adults to gratify their aggrieved sense of entitlement to sex with young bodies.
Argument One
Body autonomy is not synonymous with “sexual availability.” There are numerous situations that attenuate consent, and many contexts in which a grown adult with full, socially recognized body autonomy is nonetheless not able to give full, free, fair, and meaningful consent, but they don’t cease to have body autonomy in those circumstances. In fact, it is their right to body autonomy that places limits on what other people can do to them — having sex with someone who is, for example, asleep, is also rape. But it’s rape because it is an act of total disregard for the body autonomy of a person who is not able to consent. To have sex with a sleeping person is to treat them as an object whose interior world, subjectivity, thoughts and feelings about what is being done to their body do not matter or do not need to be taken into account. It is a violation of their right to control their own body, because they have not been given the opportunity to say yes or no at all.
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To read the full essay, visit the original post here: Three Short Arguments About Youth Liberation and Body Autonomy
Thank you for reading, and I hope you find something of value to you here.
For a world without borders, profits, and prisons, a world without the manufacture of mass death —
— narcissus