TLDR warning: This post describes in detail how some left-leaning patriarchal predators have incorporated terms like "forward thinking" and "progressive" and "freedom," to excuse the predatory behavior they want to be "free" to "explore" with children. (The operative word here is "children." The rights of adults interacting with other adults in society are not the subject of this post.) Patriarchy has been incorporating rightwing words for centuries, in order to control female children. The ease with which the left has been swayed to accept this same technique, has allowed predators to maintain their access to female children in subtle, yet just as controlling and harmful, ways. A shorter summation can be found at the end of this post, for those who would rather read a condensed version.
As with most of the posts in this blog, there is a CSA trigger warning, for anyone reading this full post.
I became a wife at five. I actually believed this for a good portion of my childhood. I whispered this, once, to a classmate in 1st grade, as I pointed to the man leading our music class. We were in a room above the back area of our adventist school gym, on the outskirts of a city in the PNW. The man was having us all move like teapots, as a record played on a portable turntable that could be folded up to look like a tan suitcase. I had been told I was the "secret wife" of this man, so I wasn't supposed to tell anyone. Somehow, my future stepmother, Pam, found out I had told someone my secret. I was removed from that 1st grade class, and placed in a 2nd grade classroom with a teacher who would make sure I wasn't being bad. That teacher, Ms. R, kept me from talking to anyone, with a look that would make the spot between my shoulder blades tighten and turn cold. I made sure I never told anyone else that secret.
My father would watch me and my baby sister, whenever my mom was working her shifts as an RN in a local hospital. She worked long hours, with lots of on-call time, so my father watched us a lot.
My father began taking us to pam's apartment for bible studies while my mom was gone. My mom knew my father was trying to help a "troubled" woman named pam, by having bible study visits with her. These kinds of visits were a normal part of adventist church members spreading the three angels' message to a lost world, so my mom believed my father was doing a good thing. For me, this was just the way things were.
pam sometimes poured something brownish into my sister's bottle, along with sugar and milk, or juice or kool-aid. The big glass bottle that held this brownish substance would sparkle under the light in pam's kitchen, turning the contents inside into a goldish sloshy mercurial substance. My sister was not always eager to drink this mixture, but once she started, she would quickly lean into her blanket on pam's living room naugahyde couch. I had to be very quiet and very good, so I wouldn't wake my sister up. If I was good, pam would turn on her TV. We didn't have a TV in my home, so I enjoyed this, and was very careful to be good.
pam sometimes took hold of my hand and led me out to her car, to go on visits with others, in other homes around that area where we all lived. Sometimes others I saw at church would be visiting, too. Sometimes before we went on these visits or before we got out of pam's car, she would get a syringe out of her bag, and give me a shot she told me I needed. Having been treated in medical settings since 5 months of age for a birth defect, I saw this as a normal part of life, and just obeyed. The shot would make me feel tickly inside, and make pam sound slower. Everything got slow and confusing. I was very careful to be good. It was something pam had to remind me of a lot, because I couldn't figure out what was happening very well, after those shots.
On one visit, pam forgot my shot. She made me look at her in the car, and told me I was so special, I was so grown up and so good, that I was going to become a "special, secret wife." She said other kids aren't allowed to do this, because they aren't as grown up as me. She said I had to be very good, and I had to obey. I understood those last words. She got out, and I wondered why she forgot to give me a shot.
This was the first time I was vaginally raped. I will describe no more of what took place. I don't remember that scene in words. That memory was filed when I had no concept of words to begin to define it. It remains in that file as it was experienced. Nobody will ever infect or appropriate or corrupt or redefine, or enjoy, the atrocity contained in that file.
Eight years later, when the adventist principal at another church-school in the PNW first met me, he immediately motioned and had me sit right next to him. His leg leaned into mine. I was thirteen, and in that one moment of unexpected adult attention, I suddenly felt a sense of something that I believed was safety. If any other adult would have noticed this extremely inappropriate moment between an older adult male first grooming a female child, my whole life could have looked very different. Sadly, in a patriarchy, such moments are viewed under a glass so distorted, most people are unable to accurately define the reality of what is happening. The female child is habitually labeled the aggressor, and the male adult is viewed as unsuspecting prey, powerless against the wiles of a calculating opponent who will potentially do them great harm. Religions use this to rail against the evils inherent in those identified as female at birth. The religious right often allows for female children to be married to adult males, because patriarchal belief systems see this as part of what female children need, due to their inherent character defects at birth. Patriarchal societies for millenia have been built around this one sexist ideology. It is embedded in the most accepted stories and myths and texts that have been allowed to be taught as history, for countless generations. It is so common, so foundational, the left can be as easily influenced by this misogynistic tenet as the right, and both sides remain blind to the truth within this dynamic. That's because the means used by the left to perpetuate this foundational misogyny is diametrically framed with differing definitions than the right uses.
My biblically informed church defined that first meeting I had with their paid school administrator, as something I caused, something I could be blamed for, something I wanted. They defined every one of this principal's sexual encounters with female students as encounters those female children caused to happen. That is why this particular crime has always been, and continues to be, prevalent. My church did not protect children like me. Most churches still don't. Most societies don't. Female children to this day are regularly handed to adult males, worldwide. This crime occurs under the strictest fascist regimes, and the most progressively minded egalitarian democracies. This one crime is embraced fully by all.
As women have gained rights, the access adult males have to female children has not decreased. It's simply morphed into something more palatable, under the guise of one simple word, a word so vital to the equality of women, the use of this word can silence a room full of concerned left-leaning adults by its mere utterance. This word is "choice."
On the day my sda school principal first met me and had me sit next to him, if any concerned adult had protectively tried to interfere and take me away from that principal I had just met, my heart would have broken. I had just experienced something that had never before happened in my childhood: I had felt seen and safe. If that hypothetical concerned adult had asked me if everything was okay, I would have said yes. And I would have meant that with every fiber of my being. I had no way to see that first moment of grooming in any other manner. I was incapable of seeing that absolutely criminal moment as anything other than safe. I was a sexualized, brutalized, terrorized child. I wouldn't have recognized real safety if it was being handed to me in a chocolate bar placed in my lap by a fluffy golden retriever. I was a destroyed child. What I believed, what I felt toward any situation, was informed by a child's brain. I was a child, absolutely incapable of making any informed choice. Full stop.
In a society made up of humans, sexual crimes against children are going to happen. The choices made by adult citizens are the only hope that exists to protect children. No child will be capable of forming the answer to such crimes. The safety and protection of children is the exclusive responsibility of the adults in that child's society. To take that first moment of safety I mistakenly believed I felt when I was drawn in by a sexual predator, and frame it as an informed choice I was making, is to hand a child to a sexual predator. Nothing about that is progressive or protective. It is culpability in the act of a crime. No child is ever precociously mature enough to be blamed for the sexual crimes committed by adults.
TLDR summation:
Marc Maron uses terms that are employed by child predators everywhere, to validate his desire to be free to prey on sexualized teen girls. He has a documented history of this behavior. In 2023, he spoke about this in many of his public guestspots on podcasts and his own Instagram Lives, many of which I have posted links to in this blog since April of 2023. He has spoken of this behavior for three and a half decades from the stage. He wrote this behavior into scripts for his TV show "Maron." He has bragged about and defended this predatory behavior in multiple print interviews for decades. He has spoken of this behavior in his WTF Podcast intros, and employed his grooming methods throughout dozens of WTF guests' interviews since the inception of his podcast in 2009. He has been using terms like "forward thinking," "free to live as one desires," "marginal, interesting, risky," "brain-bending creative risk-taking," "a zone to be as freaky as one wants," "freedom to explore creatively and personally," in the attempt to normalize the predatory sexual behavior he has chosen to take part in his whole adult life. nambla members use those same words and phrases to defend what they define as "love," when they sexually exploit male children. In a patriarchy, nambla's misuse of such words and phrases are more often recognized for what they really mean, because a patriarchal society sees that predatory behavior as an actual crime, while believing female children are born with an inherent precocious maturity and understanding, and a desire to experience such sexual crimes. They see female children as somehow capable of knowing the dark truths behind the misogynistic sexual exploitation they regularly experience. They see female children as willing, consensual participants in sexual crimes committed against them.
The right blames female children for sexual crimes committed against them. The left believes a female child chooses to participate in sexual crimes committed against them, and if anyone says otherwise, they are told they are "infantalizing" such a child. Following such logic, Joe Camel might still be marketed toward children, if cigarette companies had simply framed their defense with the outrageous premise that it is infantalizing children, to deny any child the right to choose to smoke.
Left and right ideologies can both be used by predators to perpetuate sexual exploitation of female children. The results are exactly the same, regardless. Female children, who are forever caught in diminished lives of constant sexual re-exploitation, with no way to conceive of anything else for many years, if ever.
