206. Inner truth (IV)

For six-hundred years the age of consent in Britain was 12; then, in 1875, under the influence of liberal-feminist reformers, it was raised to 13. Over the next fifty years, it would move steadily upwards—finally settling at sixteen, with politicians lobbying as late as the 1950s for it to be moved to seventeen. Then, suddenly, in the 1960s, the left went into reverse gear: the age of consent should be lowered, activists claimed, to 14, 10—or even abolished altogether. Nobody suggested that it should return to where it had been for six-hundred—very Lindy—years.

This is a good example of a perverted legal system; it is an example of how once a long-held tradition is abolished people almost go mad—a law that had not been changed in six-hundred years was changed several times over a span of a hundred years; and I expect it will be changed in my lifetime once again. The confusion is now so profound that there are people who say ten-year-olds should be placed on hormone therapy if they wish, while, at the same time, a seventeen-year-old who sexts a fifteen-year-old is dubbed a “paedophile”.

The left has a paradoxical relationship to sexuality. On the one hand, it seems to encourage sexual license—abolition of the age of consent, sex-positive feminism—and on the other hand it seems frightened of sex, as in the case of MeToo. But there is no contradiction; both positions are two sides of Puritanism, in the widest sense of that word. Remember that in 1984, the Party is officially anti-sex (the Junior Anti-Sex League is a Party organ) but simultaneously produces mass pornography to satiate the proles. The left has always combined prudery and pornography; it is opposed to the erotic—since the erotic suggests a power relation, mystery, and the pathos of distance.

The situation comes about because the left is feminine, and women wish to be perceived as sexually pure and innocent victims (MeToo); but they are also entirely sexual beings, mainly concerned with the propagation of the species, aware that their only real leverage is sex. People will occasionally say it is strange how America can be home to MeToo and a mass pornography industry, but these are just two sides of the same coin—all women claim they are innocent virgins, and all women are total harlots.

The Victorians pioneered the idea of woman as “the angel in the home”, the sexless innocent victim of rapacious men—liberal sentimentalists, such as Charles Dickens, encouraged this view for the masses. This view—that women need to be protected from male “beasts”—was the prototype of today’s MeToo and the slogan “believe all women”. Up until the 18th century, people were more open about sex and regarded women as tempters—the normal view from time immemorial, confirmed by traditional religions. Victorian liberalism flipped this round, women became innocent and men became evil. Contemporary feminists ridicule Victorianism, but only in the way Stalinists ridicule Trotskyists; they are actually the children of the Victorian prudes who saw women as “angels”.

The left seeks to pathologise normal procreative sex and replace it with sterile sex. The age of consent was first raised so that “innocent” women could be protected from marriage, and so educated to go to university and make money—the real Protestant God, the real thing Protestants wish to see multiply. At the same time, in line with its origins in Christianity, the left worships marginalised groups, including homosexuals. Pederasty is a normal part of homosexual practice, and the left seeks to facilitate this truly non-procreative sex for its holy group through the abolition of the age of consent. At the same time, it seeks to adjust other laws—as already noted, criminalising a male seventeen-year-old sexting a female fifteen-year-old—so that normal sex during a woman’s prime procreative age (12-23) is effectively criminalised. To be holy for a Puritan is to be sterile and rich, hence normal sexuality must be forbidden.