Wow. The whole fuzzy shmuzzy, we’re all beautiful people inside, no one is ever wrong, morally permissive culture has produced another gem. The Woodsman just premiered at Sundance, starring Kevin Bacon as a pedophile who’s just come out of jail and is trying to deal with his past and trying to overcome pedophilia. To quote the article from Reuters, “Ultimately, what audiences get from “The Woodsman” is not a movie about a pedophile, which is too simplistic. Rather, “The Woodsman” tells audiences what creates the disease and how keeping it in the dark ultimately does society a disservice, the film’s makers said.”
Uh-huh. I guess pedophiles are the real victims, right? Daddy hit them, or their mother didn’t breast feed them? Good grief. Let me play devil’s advocate. It is a disease, probably a genetic one. Something is triggered that young girls (or boys, who, as children, aren’t as different from girls as they are after puberty) become sexually attractive as opposed to adult women. I feel sick even doing this, but continuing the argument, it therefore becomes the problem for the pedophile, because in his eyes (almost always “his”), these children are the proper object of sexual attraction, and therefore it feels right but is societially wrong. So therefore society needs to understand that these pedophiles have an internal struggle.
Fine. I can maybe buy that. But that does not excuse the act of pedophilia! I enjoy movies in which people are killed. No, not snuff films, I just enjoy violent movies. I will sometimes cheer at an ingenious way of killing somebody, like when they took Sonny Redwhatever in Donnie Brasco. That doesn’t make it ok for me to go out and kill people.
And this “internal struggle” certainly doesn’t excuse child porn. In fact, there’s nothing you can say about the “victim” pedophiles that excuses the expression of their activites. It is clearly and always wrong, and it just pisses me off that they’re putting out this movie, trying to make it ok by showing this portrayal of a pedophile sympathetically. Before you throw words like “forgiveness” at me, let’s think of the real victims of pedophilia. Yeah, that’s right, let’s put the victims first, something that’s increasingly un-PC in this culture. Those kids are fucked up now, possibly for life, because a pedophile decided to express their “disease”. Obviously rehabilitiation is beneficial to the community, and obviously some kind of prevention is advisable, like a Pedophile’s Anonymous or something for people to go to before they reach the point where they might commit a crime. But I’m sick of reading articles about the “rights” of sex offenders. Harsh truth time, if you’re a pedophile, your privacy and your self-esteem and your ability to hug yourself is secondary to the rights of your potential victims.
Good job, hollywood. I can’t wait for whatever sick piece of crap you put out next year at Sundance.
Pree-cisely. The problem is twofold: there is a disease, but the acting upon the urges caused by the disease is a crime. Most pedophiles don’t have the insight to understand that their urges are really wrong — NAMBLA (yes, they really do exist) is full of people who insist that children want to be fondled and fucked by adults. Most of these people honestly believe that their victims want their attention, that they’re doing their victims a favor by introducing them to sex at an early age, that their victims like it. These guys are utterly convinced that they are doing no wrong.
I do feel sorry for anyone who has those urges, but as soon as they act upon the urges, they need to be (a) incarcerated and (b) treated. Here come the problems.
1: While in prison, many learn tricks to better commit crimes (”You used the babysitting ploy? That’s so 1980s. Try this one….” “Hey, thanks. I like to pick up boys at….”)
2: Treatment options for pedophiles are limited and not terribly ineffective — first you have to get it through to them that their desires are wrong, which may take years if it happens at all. Once you convince them of that, they have to be taught to focus desire on adults. It’s a long process and you can bet the state isn’t paying for enough counselors to make it happen.
In many prisons, counseling for sex offenders is optional… we just lock them up, untreated, and release them eventually, still untreated. Yep — it must suck to have internal struggle. As long as the disease remains, pedophiles and other sex offenders need treatment. They also need to be punished for their crimes.
January 30th, 2004, at 10:21 am #Pedophilia is not a disease at all, you morons. IGNORANCE is the disease.
You people are obviously too STUPID to comment on things which you clearly know NOTHING about.
August 18th, 2005, at 1:28 am #Care to elaborate? Being a stupid, ignorant moron, I’m not sophisticated enough to understand your argument.
August 18th, 2005, at 3:46 pm #Their argument is “I didn’t read the article, but because I’m dumber than a sack of hammers, I’ll comment anyway. I don’t understand sarcasm, playing devil’s advocate, or anything else fun, so I’ll just type IN CAPS to make MY POINT about nothing.”
August 18th, 2005, at 3:58 pm #As a victim of a pedophile, I can say the bastards are sick. I will be dealing with the effects of his actions for the rest of my life. Thanks for nothing
January 15th, 2006, at 1:38 am #Thanks for commenting. I’ll end there because I don’t want to abrogate your comments or worse, use them for my own argument.
I must point out the latest headline case for those of you who haven’t heard: Mark Hulett in Vermont sexually assaulted a girl for four years. Judge Edward Cashman sentenced him to 60 days after he pled guilty. He said that he no longer believes that punishment works. Apparently this judge has been off kilter for a while, several years ago he told a rape victim that she had just seen one of the harsh realities of life and should get over it.
This is what I’m talking about when I talk about people killing a baby to save a puppy. It’s a reversal of morality: The poor pedophile can’t do anything to help himself. He’s driven by obsessions that he can’t fulfill. He conflicts with himself until finally, driven by complete mental breakdown he becomes a molester. I’m trying to avoid harsh language here because I don’t want to upset people, but there aren’t enough bad words to describe someone who lets their problems become a child’s problems. I should qualify that statement; there is a difference between the normal mistakes adults make with kids, like not teaching them good coping skills, and straight out abusing them. I need to explain my earlier statement about the baby and the puppy: when you sympathize with the molester you can’t reconcile that with sympathizing for the child. You no longer want “justice” for the child, your thoughts start drifting along the lines of, “Well, I can’t change what’s already happened. The best thing to do is help this person not do this anymore.” Problem there is I’m pretty sure there is no way to treat a pedophile, save chemical castration. I’d appreciate a shrink’s perspective/knowledge on the issue here. So when you start trying to reconcile the two, the harsh fact is that the best way to deal with the issue is probably just to lock up the pedophile forever to protect further children. The prisoner sympathetic mentality doesn’t allow for that, hence the myth of a “cured” pedophile with the help of state mandated counseling and some jail time. Bullshit. If you wanted something better than prison, just put all pedophiles on an island somewhere or in a work camp. I know it sounds crazy but at least it allows them to live a semi-normal life. On the one hand it sucks that their brain is wired that way. On the other hand, you can’t let them hurt kids. What choice do you make? The mistake lots of people are making is to let pedophiles be in a position to hurt kids out of respect for the humanity of the pedophile. You can’t do that. On some level, you have to deny the humanity of the pedophile to save kids. But we don’t benefit from those kinds of choices. Our political leaders and judges, especially this one, are usually too weak to make those decisions.
January 15th, 2006, at 9:35 am #