Saturday, June 24, 2017

The Sex Offender: the 21st Century Witch

Writing for Counter Punch, author David Rosen says that "sex offenders" are to 21st century America what "witches" were to Puritan New England.
Who is a sex offender?  Where is the line drawn between the sexually acceptable and the immoral, let alone the illegal?  Is it a boundary not fixed, but a terrain of social struggle that shifts over time?
A “sex offense” is sometimes real, involving an innocent person being sexually – physically and psychologically — harmed by an offender.  Too often the victim is a loved-one or a young person.  Sometimes the offense is imaginary, the cyber fiction of an online experience, including “unacceptable” – if faked — pornography like rape and pedophile phantasies.  And sometimes it a misunderstanding or mix-message, a failure in communications that leaves one participant a grieved person.
 Read the full editorial here.

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