Savage Indignation

[poliphilo]

If you want to go round all day in a haze of Pickwickian goodwill then don't start your morning with a well-researched article about child prostution in Cambodia.

Poor Cambodia. First it gets bombed by Henry Kissinger, then it gets worked over by Pol Pot- the maddest genocidal tyrant of the 20th century- then- with half its adult population in a state of post-traumatic stress- it becomes the world's premier destination for western sex tourists.

Human nature in the raw is almost intolerably disgusting.

We talk about paedophilia- which is essentially the brutalising of the weak by the strong- as if it were something marginal and shadowy- as it has to be in Western societies because of the harshly enforced laws against it- but remove the sanction of active policing and far too many us, presented with the spectacle of an unprotected child, will be calculating (a) how to have sex with it or (b) how to enslave it and then sell it to other people for sex.

Show me the average man and I'll show you a predator and a bully.

Comments

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I wish I could think of some way of softening this judgement, but I can't.

[ibid.livejournal.com]

Cynic though I be I would beg to differ. The fact is that brutality leads to a brutal nature, that I do not deny. However human beings can also be capible of great kindness and goodness, even at times in brutal sutations. My own belief is that human nature is basically stupid, with a few souls who are basically good or evil.

At the end of the day I suppose we have to look at individuals, not all men would visit prostitutes (and frankly, horrifying though this is, I really do not see that it is any better to visit adult women selling themselves) and we must change the machismo attitude that sex is a sign of power.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

"basically stupid"- yes, I like that.

Humankind is not so much brutal as stupid.....

[ibid.livejournal.com]

I came to thqat conclusion when I was about 7 and I have never had cause to revise it. I don't know if that's great or depressing.