Posted by Jules on March 18, 2004 at 17:51:03
In Reply to: Offender Typologies posted by anovagrrl on March 18, 2004 at 14:23:00:
I have an additional personal theory on this topic that may also relate to sexual offenders in the environment of the Family. While I would rather not get into too many details, after leaving the Family I have the “opportunity” to see a great deal of what would be deemed deviant sexuality first hand. After I left the sex trade I was involved in a number of other subcultures and alternate lifestyles and it’s only been in the last few years that I have been able to make more healthy choices. While part of it was just me being naďve and clueless and I am lucky to have survived some of the situations, the detached part of me was very curious as to why these people were the way they were and I hoped to perhaps understand more about the dynamics that bewildered me in the Family. I may be completely wrong, since I have no qualifications to theorize outside of simply what I have read, experienced and observed, but my theory makes sense to me.
I believe much of sexuality, and in particular, arousal, is learned behavior. We have a physiological reaction to sexual stimuli and over time, as with any other form of stimulation, patterns are formed in our neural networks. When people are repeatedly put into situations where they are sexually stimulated under a certain set of circumstances, eventually the circumstances themselves can invoke the arousal. From what I understand of fetishes, this is the theory behind why shoes or latex arouses some people, but the things I have read usually say that these are largely due to childhood experiences. I don’t know that I agree that this is always the case. I have seen first hand men and women try things out of availability, curiosity, anger, pressure or even boredom and over time have it become something that is their preference.
What was perhaps the most interesting thing to me to observe was that people (both men and women) could engage in and seek out sexual encounters that were completely opposite from their own conscious and intellectual morals. Sexual arousal seems to be something that is hardwired in a primal part of our brain and for someone with inadequate boundaries or self-discipline, everything else can be irrelevant at that point. Endorphins are addictive and when someone is under the influence of a substance their brain chemistry is radically altered. I have learned the hard way that you should throw out everything you know about a person in that state.
I do think that to engage in these acts initially there was a strong likelihood of a predisposition for what is termed deviant sexual behavior, but I believe that there are many people who have fantasies or secret thoughts of things that they usually never act on. For some people, their own consciences prohibit this behavior. For others, it’s simply that they can’t or don’t know how to get away with it, but it they could they would. Being a throwaway for the first half of my twenties, I was considered someone who they could get away with it with (no background, no ties, no family) and I have seen some shocking things from “upstanding citizens”. Some of what is termed deviant sexual behavior is not harmful to anyone and I think our puritanical North American society should get over itself already. Some acts however are extremely harmful.
I have no basis to put out any psychological theories, but hey in for a penny, so here goes. Three psychological disorders that I think classify the “born predators” that violated us in the Family are sadists, sociopaths and pedophiles. The sadist got off on stripping a teen girl or boy naked and beating them until they begged for mercy, while rationalizing that they were doing what they were told to/what they needed to do. They enjoyed the power, were creative with humiliation and especially may have fixated on teenagers because it was about breaking their will and it’s no fun unless the submissive knows what’s happening. The sociopaths only thought of their own desires and had no concept of sex being a mutual experience. They were horny; there was no adult woman around, so a child would do just as well. Close your eyes, it’s all the same, whatever got them off. A female FG exmember once related a horrible encounter she had with a man in the Family she had to me, and said that she felt like a condom. She was not even a person to them, just a receptacle, objectified to the extreme. I can totally understand that. The pedophile always fantasized about children. The law of love was a dream come true to them and open license to rape little boys and girls.
My theory is that others learned to be aroused by children and teenagers. They tried it a few times, hey since it was out there, and found that it was incredibly exciting. I think these are the people who experience the greatest anxiety about what they did. Many people were drawn to the Family in the first place because the Family claimed they existed outside of the rules of normality and things that were forbidden appealed to them a great deal. For a decade people in the Family were encouraged to engage in sexual acts with children and it was a common and regular occurrence in many Family communes. I think that’s enough time to get a taste for something. They may have actually believed that it wasn’t harmful to the child or thought, since the child was obviously already sexualized, what’s the harm. In the Family the full-scale sexual interactions with children were stopped mostly because of “fear of the system”. Even if people wanted to engage in those acts, it was excommunicable only because the group realized that they would be chopped up in little pieces if they continued to promote this. To the Family, and people in it, it didn’t mean that it was wrong or that the desires that these people had were wrong. People can go on a long time with thinking that they are okay, it’s just that it’s not wise to be “themselves” right now.
Realizing just how harmful it really was, but still knowing that this arouses them despite what their mind and values tell them, is what I think is soul destroying now. I do (and I am cynical, yes) think that some people are just more sorry that they were caught, and now that we are mobilizing are begrudgingly willing to acknowledge, “I’m sorry that you are feeling hurt by what happened” (a Dilbert weasel style-apology if there ever was one, aka Zerby’s fallback line). I think though that some people truly hate themselves for who they have become and hate the choice they made again and again that allowed pathways that to be forged in their brains that allow children to arouse them now.
In my own personal experience with my peers, most people have an incredible amount of compassion (perhaps desensitization) to adults in the Family who perhaps molested once or twice out of pressure, or in a “relationship” with them as an underage teenager. I would be very surprised if anyone who felt extreme remorse for what they did (not how society perceived what they did) was one of those people.
And finally, the issue of trust is a huge one. In the Family, there was one FG man I knew that was one of my closest friends. He was there for me during some very difficult times and I felt I could trust him with anything. I never felt any hint of anything inappropriate in our friendship and I truly loved this person as one of my dearest friends. When Flirty Little Teens Beware was published, he told us that he had once had sex with a teenager, but she initiated it, and he felt horrible about and would always, always regret it. I was in the Family and although I was a bit shocked, didn’t think it was that big of a deal My other closest friend was girl about my age who I had known since we were little girls. I always knew something terrible had happened to her when she was a child, but in the Family it was Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, so I never knew who it was. While most of us who were abused became sexualized and “slutty”, she went the other way, and would hit anyone who touched her. She was always in so much trouble for that. Our “teen shepherds” forced her to wear skirts, a flower in her hair and to hug all the males once a day. A few years ago I went to visit her and we stayed up all night talking, as we usually did whenever we met up, but this time we talked about TF. She finally told me that she was raped when she was about six, over and over again by a Family man and the man was my friend. She didn’t know that I knew him, since we were never in the same places together, and I certainly could not tell her that I had trusted him or even known him. Real friendships were so few and far between in the Family, and to know that I had chosen so badly in the one male FG I had trusted was devastating.
All that to say I understand that I don’t know a person until I have seen their references. Their own story might be one thing; other people’s story about them might be another. While it may not seem it sometimes, I have actually given the issues regarding abusers in the Family a great deal of thought. In the end, the bottom line is that I agree with Mr./Ms Curious when they say, “I'm not sure that some SGs who were abused would see much difference or care if there even was a difference”. As I have said many times before, we are responsible for our actions, no matter what the justification for them, and the impact of abuse is the same regardless of who committed it or why it was that they did it.