Our Great British Public Schools

[poliphilo]

I don't know where paedophilia comes from and I may be barking up entirely the wrong tree but it occurs to me that if you place young males of the ruling class in schools where it's covertly (or not so covertly) accepted that bigger boys take smaller boys as their bitches you shouldn't be entirely surprised if some of them carry this behaviour over into adult life.

Comments

[ooxc.livejournal.com]

I don't think that's enough as an explanation - "public schools" surely date back to when it wasn't unusual for grown men to marry little girls. That's just as likely to be the root of paedophilia

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Public school culture as it exists today was surely created in the mid-19th century. I've only the haziest of notions of how things were before the advent of Dr Arnold and Muscular Christianity.

Obviously a lot of paedophiles don't go to public school, but I can't help thinking that public school culture must warp the sexuality of some of the people who pass through the system.

[ooxc.livejournal.com]

I see the confusion.I was thinking that Eton, for example, has 16th century foundation, but was created to give more children the opportunity of the medieval assumption that noble children should be sent into another household for their education. Therefore, I was assuming that all public school culture is based on sending children away from home as beneficial opportunity. I don't know much about 19th century public schools

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I suppose most of our public schools are 19th century foundations.

Anyway, it's the 19th century ones I presume to know something about because I was a boarder at one of them.

[ooxc.livejournal.com]

I've only worked at prep schools, and taken part in historical recreations with prep school children

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

In a similar fashion, Mother Church's little problem begins in Her seminaries.

In his biography of Oscar Wilde, Frank Harris had some rather harsh words for English public schools and ventured that, if mothers knew what really went on in such places, boarding schools would vanish overnight.

He also noted that, historically, the Church functioned as an escalator in an otherwise rigid class system and that any man theoretically might advance through the social ranks via the priesthood. Harris said that, with the waning of the Church's temporal power, sexual perversion had taken its place, offering an ambitious young man a ready means to rise above his station. Such men were found at all levels of English society and had an out-sized yet largely hidden influence on politics and culture.

As this thing unfolds, I am reminded of those words quite often.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I believe Frank Harris was right on both counts.

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

I should sound at least a note of caution, though.

By sexual perversion Harris obviously meant homo-erotic activity and this from a man who enjoyed seducing teen-aged girls. When he declared this one a pithecine, or that one a common scoundrel, I may accept his judgement but a voice of moral authority Frank Harris was not. His treatment of Wilde is available at Project Gutenberg, by the way. I found it surprisingly well written.

Today, it's not such a big deal, but within living memory it was illegal to be actively homosexual and ruinous to be discovered as such. Yet, isn't it also true that a large element of HM civil service is gay? I remember British friends mentioning this about Sir Humphrey Appleby, when they learned I'd seen Yes, Minister. If there was a sizeable number of gay civil servants, there might also exist a relatively powerful network of mutual aid and protection shielding its members from public scrutiny, one that has been successfully doing so for a very long time. It isn't so much conspiracy, in the usual sense, so much as a matter of survival. Given the cruel persecution they faced, who could blame them?

The problem is that such a network might be abused to shield most any behaviour, however noxious, and slippery slopes can get steeper when you're already beyond the law and the prophets.

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

Looks like that was volume two. Here's volume one.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Frank Harris was notorious for making things up. I understand his book on Wilde needs to be read with a salt cellar to hand.

If Wilde were around today we'd be collaring him as a paedophile. Some of his boys- in particular the ones he purchased in the Middle East- were almost certainly below our current age of consent.

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

I shall repeat that it is well-written.

Harris's defence of Wilde isn't credible on the face of it, actually. What comes across is that he was very fond of Oscar and devoted a lot of effort to, if not exonerating him then, at least searching earnestly for a more favourable light in which to cast him. I suspect however that the utter contempt in which Harris held England, English morality, and the English themselves, was entirely genuine. I'd even venture that's why Mencken sung his praises so.

Honestly? If Michelangelo Buonarotti were around today you'd be collaring him as well. I rather think that was Harris's point and it's as valid today as it was a hundred years ago.