Billy Bragg didn’t much care for my appearance on Andrew Doyle’s Free Speech Nation.

He got it wrong, though. I had not accused trans people or gay men of anything of the kind. I had simply pointed out that Minor Attracted Persons (MAPs), a sanitised term for paedophiles, were being included by queer activists in the ever-expanding rainbow flag and that it should be a matter of some concern. What I said was: “I don’t, as a lesbian, want to be lumped in with ‘minor attracted persons’, which, of  course, is the latest addition to this rainbow coalition and means ‘child abusers’”.

The first use of the euphemism “minor attraction” to describe those who desire sex with children was back in 1988, by a journalist called Elizabeth Peterson in a Christian publication. She was appealing for empathy and understanding towards “paedophiles”. Since when, there has been a creeping attempt in certain quarters to normalise their desires.

In particular, a number of British academics within the Queer Theory discipline have, over the past few years, pushed the idea that “paedophilia and child abuse are not the same thing”, and that “paedophilia is a sexual attraction pattern that shares common features with other sexual orientations”. Bafflingly, child sexual abuse is being described by some clinicians as a sexual identity worthy of empathy. Additionally, attempts have been made  to bring it under the rainbow coalition where it should be treated with dignity and respect; Norwegian “queer” academic  and professor of ethics Ole Martin Moen argues that paedophilia should be treated as a sexual identity.

Jacob Breslow, feels the same. He was, until his affiliation with organisations promoting paedophilia as a sexual identity came to light, a trustee at Mermaids. When a graduate student at the London School of Economics, Breslow gave a presentation at a 2011 event for the US-based organisation B4U-ACT, co-founded in 2003 by a convicted child sex offender to help people “who are sexually attracted to children and desire assistance”. There, he said that: “Allowing for a form of non-diagnosable minor attraction is exciting, as it potentially creates a sexual or political identity by which activists, scholars and clinicians can begin to better understand Minor Attracted Persons.”

Then, in June 2021, trans-identified queer scholar Allyn Walker published their book A Long, Dark Shadow: Minor-Attracted People and their Pursuit of Dignity, making a clear link between queer theory and child abuse apologism.  In it, Walker posits there are many similarities between MAPs and lesbians and gays. Walker’s PhD thesis, titled “Understanding Resilience Strategies among Minor-Attracted Individuals”, argued that such men should be permitted to view child abuse imagery as a “harm-reduction technique” or “form of therapy” to help “maintain abstinence from sexual contact with children”. Following complaints about their book being “pro-paedophilia”, Walker was suspended from their professorial post at Old Dominion, Virginia.

Suggested reading

Mermaids is a threat to gay rights

By Julie Bindel

You might remember Karl Andersson, a UK-based student in queer studies at the University of Manchester, who got into trouble last year when an essay based on his experiences of masturbating to Japanese comics of child sexual abuse was published in the academic journal Qualitative Research. When the complaints flooded in, the university had no choice but to suspend Andersson, claiming that because he worked in a “niche area” of studies, no one noticed what he was up to. That “niche” is queer studies.

Andersson also publishes the magazine Destroyer: A Journal of Apollonian Beauty and Dionysian Sexuality, a Swedish-based journal focused on sex and “romance” between men and underage boys. Its stated objective is “to bring back the adolescent boy as one of the ideals of gay culture”.  Breslow has praised Destroyer in his own work, claiming it documents the “sexual desire of boys”.

Queer theorists such as Breslow, Walker and Andersson are pushing the line that paedophilia is a hardwired medical condition, and that therefore there must be some kind of “paedophilic gene”. And if these attractions are both innate and uncontrollable, the answer is, according to queer theorists, to feed the beast.

Craig Harper, Associate Professor at the School of Social Sciences at Nottingham Trent University (NTU), also promotes this line of thought. He collaborates with Prostasia — a California-based charity which advocates the use of sex dolls as a way for men wishing to rape small children to vent their sexual frustrations. Prostasia also gives pointers on its website as to “age play” — adults fantasising during sex that one of them is a child.

Harper says MAPs are targeted by unfair online abuse. His study on their use of child sex dolls found that “when asking participants directly about their engagement with criminal activities, we found that there were no differences in self-reported offending between those who owned child-like dolls and those who did not.” The term “self-reporting” is key here. As Caitlin Roper, feminist activists and author of the book Sex Dolls, Robots and Woman Hating points out, arguments used in support of men’s use of child sex abuse dolls, “build on previous arguments by paedophiles and queer theorists in support of men’s sexual access to children”.

A number of organisations, such as Virtuous Paedophiles and B4U-ACT, argue that child abuse imagery and sex dolls are good ways of keeping these men “satisfied”. But Kathleen Richardson, Professor of Ethics and Culture of Robots and Artificial Intelligence (AI) at De Montfort University, is deeply concerned about the way that men’s desire for sex with children is being enabled and encouraged. “For adults to identify with practices that involve the abuse of children implies these are not lone individuals,” says Richardson, “but groups to discuss these issues and are working with academics who use ethics to do their politics of persuasion by arguing they present no harm to children. In fact, it is impossible to have a ‘sexual identity’, without consideration of what it entails.

Suggested reading

The founding myth of Stonewall

By James Kirchick

There are, according to Gail Dines, author of Pornland, studies of use of Internet pornography which have drawn attention to the extent of adult sexual interest in children. “Clinical experience and now research evidence are accumulating to suggest that the Internet is not simply drawing attention to those with existing paedophilic interests but is contributing to the crystallisation of those interests in people with no explicit prior sexual interest in children,” says Dines.

Prior to the internet, groups of men that seeking to decriminalise child sexual abuse met as special interest groups. In 1974, a group of “paedophile rights” activists in the UK formed the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) and somehow managed to be welcomed into the upper echelons of polite, liberal society.

PIE, which openly argued for the abolition of the age of consent, convinced the National Council of Civil Liberties (NCCL) to accept them by claiming to be an oppressed sexual minority similar to the gay community. When I interviewed PIE leader Tom O’Carroll in 2015, he told me he had never liked the word paedophile, and that one of the main positives of being accepted by the NCCL, and, as a result, by some gay groups, was that it would mean that men like him could unify and “organise against oppression”. “We were kind of stuck with the word,” O’Carroll told me. “If we had another word, more like gay, it would be hard to stigmatise us.”

O’Carroll suggested that, rather than “paedophile” the word “kindly”, should be used, because it was similar to the Dutch word “kinder”, meaning “children”. “Being ‘kind’ as well as being sexual,” he said.

Alarmingly, these men were not only being painted as harmless, partly by their association with NCCL, but also potentially beneficial to society. In his study of PIE, published in 1983, the psychologist Glenn Wilson made the extraordinary claim that “many members admitted sexual feelings for children which they had been able to contain or turn to social good. Some gravitated toward occupations such as schoolteacher or social worker, where they could enjoy the company of children without plotting abuse”.

But the bad old days of PIE appear to have taught us nothing. PIE was disbanded in 1984, up until 1983 it lobbied for the age of consent to be abolished, appearing on Newsnight to argue its case.

Their influence is being felt still within the echelons of academia and now echoed in the thoughtless slurs of musicians. Those of us who campaign to end the sexual abuse of children do not point the finger at gay men as likely perpetrators, despite Billy Bragg accusing me of doing so. I lived through the Eighties when it was a regular occurrence for lesbians to lose custody of their children, usually to violent ex-husbands, because we were considered to be sexual perverts and dangerous for children to be around.

It is clearly an abhorrence to suggest that gay men, by virtue of being same sex attracted, are a danger to boys. But our defence of gay men from prejudice and bigotry must not act as a smokescreen for those groups that are seeking to normalise sex with children. And this is why including so-called MAPs as part of the rainbow flag would be a disaster.

We should have learned by now that sexual predators of children are not just another oppressed sexual minority in need of support and understanding. Their apologists should not be corrupting our universities with a dangerous ideology. The sexual abuse of children is stigmatised for a reason, and so it should remain.

But help is on the way, for we now have the cure for this problem: Critical Theory. The goal of “Theory” is to overthrow the Force, liberating the disadvantaged from their mental slavery to usher in an epoch of perfect equality, or even — dare we hope — turn the tables on the white cis-het male oppressor. If you fall into a hegemonic category, you must repent of your privilege and become an ally to the oppressed. If from a victim group, you must wake up and fight against lies about “objective truth”, “free speech” or universal standards, which are oppressing you and erasing your identity.

If you have the temerity to disagree with this conspiracy theory, or demand evidence for its sweeping claims, you’re part of the problem, helping to reproduce the Force and uphold the System. Time for your re-education, otherwise known as diversity training.

Critical Theory is the philosophy which underlies Wokeness. It consists of layers of assertions, built up over time, with each new generation of theories building on the inventions of previous theorists. Using moral self-righteousness and the leftist monoculture of the soft social sciences to shield them from scientific scrutiny, its practitioners have founded a series of fields such as queer theory, critical race theory, fat studies and critical gender theory.

Gradually, these have intersected and morphed into an all-encompassing Theory, which today’s identity politics activists use to justify a ratcheting programme of language policing, Twitter mobbing and re-education. When challenged, they wheel out Theory buzzwords like “white fragility”, “heteronormative” or “microaggression”.

Critical Race Theory, in particular, has become such a concern that last month the US president issued an executive order barring its use in federal institutions, while yesterday in Parliament Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch condemned it as a “dangerous trend” in race relations.

Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay’s Cynical Theories is the most thorough attempt yet to unmask this Social Justice religion, or, to use postmodernist lingo, to “deconstruct” its “metanarrative”. It tracks the genealogy of critical race, gender, queer and fatness theory, painstakingly pointing out logical leaps and flaws. The two authors, along with a third figure, Peter Boghossian, came to well-earned prominence in October 2018 when they revealed the scandal that they were able to get seven hoax papers published in established gender studies, fat studies and queer studies journals.

These included a purported participant observation study of a dog park alleging that canines engage in rape culture and a paper on the penis as social construct. Though designed to be ridiculous, these studies passed peer review because they ticked the right ideological boxes and demonstrated proficiency in postmodernist jargon. One even won an award. Like Alan Sokal’s similar hoax in the 1990s, Pluckrose and company exposed the fact that these studies trafficked in ideology and faux-knowledge, and could thus be manipulated in a way no scientific journal dedicated to understanding the real world can be.

As a Masters student in Sociology at the London School of Economics in the early 1990s, I encountered the prelapsarian world in which high theory and activism were still separate. Coming from an economics background, I was stunned to find myself in a sociological theory seminar that felt like a séance, in which participants riffed off each other, tossing in morsels of jargon or fragments from canonical thinkers like Michel Foucault, Claude Levi-Strauss or Homi Bhabha, while shedding little to no light on the workings of the social world beyond our classroom.

The big thing was still postmodernism, the idea that modernisation and progress are a myth, along with its bigger sister, post-structuralism, which holds that language is just a bunch of words which gain meaning from each other and have no relationship to anything in the real world. Postmodernism was an art rather than a science, a play on words instead of a serious attempt to improve our knowledge of society.

Of course, there may be a grain of truth to Foucault’s untested idea that knowledge affects power relations, or to the post-structuralist claim that context has some effect on the meaning of words. Phrases like “astral world of signs” or “liquid modernity” really are a lot of fun. Yet, rather than make such claims measurable and modest, its contemporary practitioners have elevated the idea of knowledge as oppression onto the plane of sacred values, with reality and theory two non-overlapping magisteria that science cannot solve. Relativism insulates Theory from scientific scrutiny.

After the seminar, I noticed one especially humourless classmate dressed in proletarian gear flogging the Socialist Worker in the quad, having swapped his postmodernist theory for Marxist practice. Nowadays, his high theory and activism would be better coordinated, united in the form of a strident intersectional identity politics which manifests in the form of open letters to cancel professors, Robin D’Angelo’s White Fragility training or the New York Times’s 1619 Project. Indeed a key theme of Pluckrose and Lindsay’s book is that the political radicalism of the 1960s-80s has commandeered the pretend-expertise of postmodernism, invested it with seriousness and pressed it into action as Cancel Culture.

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David Lammy's double standards

By Eric Kaufmann

Just as Salafi Islam was a quietist form of fundamentalism that ignited when mixed with Marxist theories of action, Theory has now entered its activist phase. It has migrated off campus into government, the media and the corporate world. This is why the sane mainstream can no longer afford to ignore its abstruse nonsense and why, whatever we think of Trump, we should applaud his executive order banning Critical Race Theory in the US government.

The book’s intellectual history is vital, and I commend its plea for a return to what Jonathan Rauch terms “liberal science”. This said, the authors fail to grasp the liberal roots of Theory, and how Left-liberalism’s well-intentioned and sometimes protective attitude to minorities has overreached and helped make the problem worse.

They believe a sharp emotional line can be drawn between a nice “left-liberal” who “favour[s] the underdog” and a totalising victim-oppressor worldview. Unfortunately, it can’t. Once your default position is warmth toward supposedly helpless minorities and suspicion of majorities, you have stepped across an affective abyss which sacrifices your objectivity, and this makes it far harder to resist the leftist good guys just trying to protect the meek. After all, the hearts of activists fighting for the underdog are in the right place and you wouldn’t want to be associated with the dark side.

Theory is set up as a form of science but it rarely advances through logical argument, and it can only be countered if it rests on a pre-cognitive base of emotional neutrality.

While the principles of reason and liberalism are opposed to extreme egalitarianism, there is no appeal to the heart in contemporary liberalism to viscerally counter the powerful Woke metanarrative of “defending the weak against the tyranny of the majority”. Until such a thing happens, liberal science will continue to mock Theory the way Sokal did in 1996 — while wokeness barrels on, capturing the hearts of young, educated and “right-thinking” people.

John Ellis’s The Breakdown of Higher Education is a case study of what happened at the epicentre of Theory, the university. It provides a first-hand account of how the cultural revolution that institutionalised critical theory and Cancel Culture began and spread. As a British-born emeritus professor of English at the University of California Santa Cruz who has taught there since 1966, Ellis recalls an exciting time when staff and students learned the western canon, and used it as a jumping-off point to freely discuss ideas without fear of being shamed or disciplined. He recounts how Social Justice ideology has, over the course of his lifetime, driven the pursuit of truth and excellence out of the social sciences and humanities in American universities.

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Are young people turning to the Right?

By Eric Kaufmann

This cultural change began with demographic shifts and was consolidated through political discrimination. In 1969, the authoritative Carnegie faculty surveys found that 45% of the professoriate leaned left, 28% right and 27% in the middle. By 2004, a study of party registration data for Berkeley and Stanford university faculty showed an 8:1 left-to-right ratio, rising to 49:1 among junior faculty. Trend-setting California offered a clue as to what was happening. By 2016, another study found that the modest 2:1 left-to-right nationwide faculty ratio of 1969 had given way to a yawning 12:1 tilt. By 2018, Mitchell Langbert’s study of the party registrations of faculty in the top 50 US liberal arts colleges discovered that 39% had zero Republican registrations, with most of the rest in single digits.

Ellis remarks on the confluence of chance events that allowed this capture to take place. In effect, during the sixties, a combination of baby boom demographics and rising affluence resulted in the universities undergoing massive expansion. This occurred at precisely the moment that the Vietnam War and Civil Rights movement delegitimated the country’s traditional narrative, a conjunction that created an opening for radical students to enter the professoriate in large numbers, transforming it.

Once in post, the new generation deepened their ideological grip by controlling recruitment. Instead of being inculcated into the dominant truth-seeking culture of the university, the radicals now possessed the critical mass to escape Rauch’s “liberal science” and transform the entire mission of academia. Now truth-seekers would have to bend to orthodoxy instead of the other way round. Instead of their traditional motto of veritas, the university now stood for radical activism, with a focus on disadvantaged race, gender and sexuality groups.

Ellis draws on John Stuart Mill’s argument that “the opposition of the other… keeps each within the limits of reason and sanity” — bad ideas on the extremes are sidelined. Once academia becomes a monoculture, however, with conservative voices excluded or suppressed, there is no longer a battle of ideas at the centre, but rather a climate which empowers “the most extreme and exciting positions of the left”, in Ellis’s words, a group who come to exemplify the shared outlook of the campus. The result has been ever-more strident campus radicalism, culminating in disasters like the Evergreen State and Middlebury affrays, shoutdowns and no-platformings. Professors who fail to conform to campus orthodoxy face open letters, chanting students and Twitter mobs trying to end their livelihoods.

Meanwhile, says Ellis, the university is failing its students. A succession of studies show that graduateliteracy levels and general skills have slipped compared to past generations. In one study, 45% of students showed no skills development over their entire university course. Meanwhile, implicit racial quotas at leading universities have resulted in minority students with weaker results being improperly allocated to universities that don’t match their aptitude, producing high dropout rates or transfers to less rigorous courses — with their relative lack of success in prestige fields then blamed on a racist curriculum rather than a flawed admissions process.

Universities have stonewalled attempts to obtain data on graduation rates for preferentially-admitted students, Ellis writes, because “they don’t want anyone to know the damaging results of these policies…the harm they do to black students”.

Suggested reading

Is Critical Race Theory racist?

By Helen Pluckrose

The mushrooming of equity and diversity bureaucracies in recent decades has both increased the chilling effect on conservative and centrist scholars and replaced an ethos of excellence with one of “diversity”. Diversity training using Theory-inspired materials is now mandatory across most American universities, and some University of California departments are requiring job applicants to complete “diversity statements” outlining how they are advancing orthodoxy. Administrators, not scholars, weed the pile of applications, which is only then sent on to academic departments.

Ellis believes that universities have passed the point of no return and cannot be saved from within. The only hope is for outside intervention, from donors, trustees or the Government. However, time is short, for Social Justice is now taking root outside the campus, from K-12 schools to corporations. As new generations are raised to prioritise sensitivity to minorities (as interpreted by Theory) over truth, the common sense of the off-campus majority may no longer exist in sufficient strength to resist dogma.

Pluckrose and Lindsay, inhabiting the more intellectually plural world of commentary and journalism, believe good ideas will win out over bad. Ellis, who has seen the face of repression first-hand within the American university system, is, in my view, more realistic.

Conservatives and traditional liberals naively expected the political correctness and speech codes of the 1990s to fade away. They wasted their energy on economics and foreign policy, neglected the culture and are now in danger of losing it altogether. Only an active mobilisation, involving the intervention of elected governments, can hope to reverse Theory’s capture of elite institutions, the current slide toward collective unreason and the emergence of a truly Orwellian public culture.