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Analyzing the psychotherapist
This was posted by Pete on Friday April 27 2012 on the OBU Forum (http://forum.obu-investigators.com/). It is his reaction to a psychotherapist’s contribution to the criminalization and destruction of a 13 year old boy in the UK.
So, the Daily Mail is convulsing in another of its sex panics again, this time over young adolescents who masturbate over pornographic images, as opposed to the more “healthy” kind who do Olympic swimming training at 5.00am each morning or raise money for the poor and disadvantaged through charity runs:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2135203/Jamie-13-kissed-girl-But-hes-Sex-Offender-Register-online-porn-warped-mind-.html
The two are distinct populations, of course; aspiring Olympic athletes and charity runners never even think of fondling their genitals, unlike compulsive adolescent porn-masturbators who can think of nothing else.
To be more precise, this throwback to the eighteenth century panic over onanism in children is focussed on the 21st century phenomenon of internet pornography. Apparently, innocent and pure young kiddies are now accessing raw, hard-core porn, and becoming depraved sex beasts as a result. To protect children from this horror, of course, we must infringe your liberty - a small price to pay if just one child is saved.
Here is the latest recruit to the Mail’s campaign for more sanctimonious censorship and dreary decency, psychotherapist John Woods. Mr Woods works at the Portman Clinic, which for some years has been part of the NHS despite its more independent beginnings (in other words, it now depends on the NHS, and the University Discourse which informs it, for continued funding). Here he is describing 13 year old “Jamie”, who began looking at internet porn at the age ten on a friend’s laptop:
‘I stopped leaving my room and seeing my friends because when I was away from the pornography, I was dying to get back to see what else I could find.’
Mr Woods continues:
“… it was only when the police came knocking one morning that Jamie’s secret life was exposed. After identifying that someone in the house was accessing child porn, they took Jamie’s laptop away for examination. Jamie is only 13 — and he still hasn’t even kissed a girl, let alone had sex. Though he is only a child himself, the result is that he has been put on the Sex Offender Register, blighting his life for the foreseeable future. Even with intensive therapy, Jamie still suffers from deep shame — ‘as if it is written across my forehead’ — which has led him to fear he will never be able to form a healthy relationship with a woman.”
So eager is Mr Woods to describe the horrors of easy-access internet porn, he appears strangely unperturbed by the horror of forcing a thirteen-year-old onto the life-destruction register. Apparently, having your life “blighted” by being placed on the social abjection list is just one of those things, like weather or haemorrhoids. Mr Woods doesn’t seem to be aware that it was actively constructed and propagandised by reactionary ideological state apparatuses such as ambitious new policing agencies and, indeed, the organ he has chosen to write for, and is therefore a quintessentially political creation.
Neither does it appear to occur to this professional psychotherapist that torturing a youngster by compulsory registration on a toxic blacklist is itself utterly depraved. The “deep shame” Jamie has experienced “even after intensive therapy” seems obvious – he’s a compulsive wanker, so he’s ashamed now that his sins have finally come to light. His body (his material existence) may now have to go through the indescribable hell of long term social abjection, but thanks to people like Mr Woods, his soul might be redeemed. He might feel better when he’s dead.
But the shame this boy feels is vastly more likely to be a human response to deliberate and devastating humiliation – very few boys of his age want their wanking fantasies exposed by zealous police officers to parents, peers and pious psychotherapists. Only a twisted sadist or a politically myopic moralist could imagine that such an outcome could ever amount to his salvation.
Mr Woods, again apparently so convinced of his own impeccable intentions that he remains shockingly ignorant of his repetition of well-worn propaganda from authoritarian (and self-appointed) child salvationists of yore, gives us several more harrowing stories of innocent youngsters depraved and damaged by sexual images. Bar-stool anecdotes, it seems, based on extreme and unrepresentative examples, should now count as incontrovertible evidence for social policy. Here is his verdict:
“As a therapist, I am convinced that these images can be deeply traumatising to children — not least because a competitive market means that pornographers are trying to outdo each other to come up with the most extreme images. This contest to push the boundaries means that straight intercourse is considered too boring. Images of brutal anal sex and women being humiliated and degraded by two or more men at any one time are the new norms. For many young boys, this means their first sexual experience is not a nervously negotiated request for a dance from a girl at the end of the school disco. It is watching grotesquely degrading images of women, all too often mixed in with violent abuse.”
Let’s pause a little here. Pornographers are to be condemned because something called “straight intercourse” is deemed “too boring.” Anal sex is “brutal”, even though many homosexual males practise it with deep, consensual love. Are women who participate in sex with two or more men (or women) simply passive victims who are being “degraded,” or as Camille Paglia would argue, Amazonian goddesses demonstrating their sexual supremacy by saying, “Whatever you throw at, me I’ll take it and come back for more, so don’t get tired!” We might ask, “What has Mr Woods been watching?” Probably, I would venture, nothing but his own fantasies about internet porn, based on selective imaginings from the pressured confessions of his unfortunate patients.
Mr Woods considers these children traumatised, a phenomenon which he believes has led them astray. But astray from what? What exactly is the mysteriously undefined gold standard of "mental and emotional health" Woods assumes to be self-evident but never describes? Long-term, petit-bourgeois monogamy? Family values? Both are ideological constructs, not natural givens, and both are perfectly compatible with long term misery, child neglect and abuse. Even so, in Mr Woods' world, a sexually curious thirteen year old will be "deeply traumatised" by pictures of willies and growlers, but not by a dawn raid on his home by the British porn Stasi, which will rupture his life irretrievably. What's worse for a youngster of this age - porn or the ferocious enforcement of laws against porn?
Is deviation from conservative sexual norms always “grotesquely degrading”? Should those who have never seen the “degrading porn” they have already pre-emptively condemned really be considered the best people to pass judgement for everyone else? If some teenagers “over-masturbate” because of internet porn, is there a line of normalcy below which they could be said to “under-masturbate”? And if so, who drew this line and where exactly is it?
The line of sexual normalcy implicit in Mr Woods’ impassioned sermon remains piously exalted but mystifyingly undefined, as if decades of queer theory and poststructuralist critique had never existed: only deviants are fingered in Mr Woods’ world of sexual psychopathology.
Compulsive wankers, apparently, will not be able to negotiate a request for a dance from a girl at the school disco because, in their heads, there is only “brutal” shagging (and more shagging). In Mr Woods’ rather parochial, rather conservative, rather 1950s world, gay boys who would prefer to dance with other boys (and maybe go on to try out some anal sex) don’t, or shouldn’t, exist. Or perhaps they, too, are pitiful victims of sexual psychopathology in need of “intensive therapy”.
Of course, Mr Woods (again without appearing to realise that he is mouthing the words of the politically motivated and deeply authoritarian child salvationist movement) concludes:
“All these cases are only the tip of the iceberg. For every young person who has come to the attention of police or social services, there will be tens of thousands more who manage to keep their habit under wraps — but who still face long-term consequences for their mental and emotional health.”
There’s that hoary old “tip of the iceberg” chestnut again. Of course, it could equally be argued that, aside from the tiny minority unfortunate enough to come to the attention of “the authorities” and Mr Woods, “tens of thousands” of young adolescents are able to look at porn, enjoy a good wank, and go to school and college without any problems, get good exam results and pursue satisfying careers and relationships as well. Very few of them, we might rationally suppose, go straight for the shag in the first minute of interaction, or isolate themselves permanently from human contact for fear of inserting their penises into the nearest opening. That Mr Woods finds himself “treating” 12 year olds “who have convictions for looking at child porn because they did not realise they had crossed the line” might raise questions about who draws this line and to what end? Criminalising 12 year olds? How sick and evil is that? This doesn’t appear to register as an issue on Mr Woods’ radar.
The small minority of brainless parents who allow small children to take laptops into their bedrooms unsupervised may need their heads examined, but that doesn’t mean that earnest moralists should draw up new laws and regulations inhibiting everyone else’s liberty.
We look back at those eighteenth century torturers of child onanists with horror; but today, their descendants get generous exposure in our mainstream media. Maybe those eighteenth century sexual hygienists were more clued up on their subject than their 21st century moral descendants are: kids don’t need access to the internet to view indecent images. They need only to consult their imagination, as they have since human masturbation began.
What Mr Woods’ earnest posturing proves to me is something that Freud would have had little hesitation in endorsing: psychoanalysis should never, ever be used as an instrument of social conformity. That clinical psychoanalysts and therapists have done so throughout the twentieth century (albeit with numerous honourable exceptions) is a true betrayal of Freud’s radical legacy. Psychoanalysis has nothing to do with social/sexual normalcy, which it sees as a tyrannical regime generating the discontent and misery that makes psychoanalysis necessary in the first place.
I tend to concur with thinkers like Camille Paglia and Leo Bersani: pornography is more capable of revealing the unprettified but magnetic truth of sex than hypocritical, petit-bourgeois moralising could ever achieve and should never be banned. Perhaps what should be banned, or at least retired, is the deluded notion that young adolescents are sexless and incapable of distinguishing between masturbatory fantasy and reality. That would be true of psychotics, not ordinary kids.
Tucked away in Mr Woods’ article is this rather revealing statement:
“… even though we are one of the very few units in the country dealing with these issues, funding cuts mean mental health services are having to make drastic efficiency savings that significantly reduce our service.”
Perhaps this recession may bring some good things in its wake despite the numerous economic car crashes it has caused.
Editor note. Further information on the 'work' of Woods or of the Portman Clinic would be welcome.
To read about the other boy below, click here.
Created on 04/28/2012 08:55 AM by Editor
Updated on 06/09/2012 10:41 AM by Editor
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