Victims of the Id: There But for the Grace of God Go … Hey, Maybe You, Not Me!

Posted on | September 2, 2013 | 86 Comments

‘I should be telling you good girls don’t . . .’

“I took a fast right on Russell, then a left onto Maryland Parkway . . . and suddenly I was cruising in warm anonymity past the campus of the University of Las Vegas . . . no tension on these faces; I stopped at a red light and got lost, for a moment, in a sunburts of flesh in the cross-walk: fine sinewy thighs, pink mini-skirts, ripe young nipples, sleeveless blouses, long sweeps of blond hair, pink lips and blue eyes — all the hallmarks of a dangerously innocent culture.
“I was tempted to pull over and start mumbling obscene entreaties: ‘Hey, Sweetie, let’s you and me get weird. Jump into this hotdog Caddy and we’ll flash over to my suite at the Flamingo, load up on ether and behave like wild animals in my private, kidney-shaped pool . . . .’
“Sure we will, I thought. But by this time I was far down the parkway, easing into the turn lane for a left at Flamingo Road. . . .”
— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

You have the right to remain silent, and if any less-than-wholesome thought has ever crossed my mind, that’s between me and the Lord.

As for any depraved behaviors in which anyone might allege I ever indulged, permit me to point out that (a) heavy adolescent drug use may have rendered me temporarily insane for days or weeks at a time, (b) the statute of limitations expired long ago, (c) occasional psilocybin flashbacks cannot be ruled out, (d) some of my ex-girlfriends may have been pathological liars, (e) I used to be a Democrat, you know, and (f) I have the right to have my attorney present during questioning.

God bless the Constitution, I say, and guys who think they can avail themselves of the confessional mode favored by contemporary feminists — i.e., “the personal is political” — are apt to get a rude awakening, as Hugo Schwyzer discovered to his chagrin.

My stern disapproval of fornication and other sins of the flesh should never be mistaken for self-righteousness or a lack of empathy for the perverted souls whose transgressions are exposed before the world. Please, don’t ever tell me I’m ignorant about sin, but don’t think you can impugn me as a hypocrite, either.

We are merely discussing hypotheticals. Just because, hypothetically, I may have gotten away with something doesn’t require me to sympathize with idiots who get caught, and thank God there were no digital cameras or online social-media back in the day, eh?

You can’t prove a damned thing. And where’s my lawyer?

Does that girl look familiar to you? Honestly, I’ve never seen her before, but if she looks familiar to you, you had best not admit it:

I started having sex with adult men when I was 13 years old.
Neglected at home and ostracized at school, I found comfort in the sexual attentions of older men. Unlike boys my own age, who cruelly taunted me, older men were nice to me. Unlike my emotionally distant father, older men paid attention to me. They were grooming me, but to that chubby, attention-starved teenage girl, their attentions felt a lot like love.
And so I created Prodigy chat rooms with names like “13yo girl home alone” and spent hours chatting and having phone sex with the men who would find me there. I “dated” men in their 20s and 30s that I met at the movie theater, online or hanging around local college town with my other underage girlfriends. I pursued these relationships with Lolita-like abandon. The terrifying thing is how few adult men ever said no.
I was not coerced. I consented to all these sexual encounters in the basest sense of the world. But I was making choices that I wasn’t emotionally equipped to make. Legally, that’s why statutory rape laws exist. Because like an intoxicated person, an underage person is not truly capable of informed consent. . . .

You can read the whole terrifying thing, but let me intrude this objection: Blaming your parents — “Neglected at home . . . my emotionally distant father” — is a sort of Freudian cop-out. Anyone can, in retrospect, discern the origins of their misbehavior in the unfortunate circumstances of their youth. Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer, Adolf Hitler, Hugo Schwyzer — has there ever been a deviant who could not have rationalized their crimes in this manner?

Grant that the 13-year-old sexually acting out her adolescent discontents is not legally responsible for her actions, but blaming it on parents who didn’t pay you as much attention as you thought you deserved . . .

Sorry, sweetheart, I’m not buying that.

Your parents were probably busy trying to earn enough money to pay the bills, and faulting your dad as “emotionally distant”?

Nope. Sorry. darling. Go sell that to somebody gullible enough to think that what you need now is more sympathy. Debra Lafave probably deserves more sympathy, but she’ll get no sympathy from me.

‘Age Is Just a Number’ (and So Is Breast Size)

Cute chicks get away with stuff nobody else can get away with, which is why I never bought into Kaitlyn Hunt’s “cute cheerleader” act. At the risk of further offending the easily offended, there are other questionable assertions made by “Emily”:

The fact is, a 14-year-old girl may be capable of agreeing to sex with a 49-year-old man, but she doesn’t have the emotional and mental maturity to consent. I was 25 before I realized that every man I’d slept with as a teenager was a pedophile. . . .

This is something about which I’ve chastised some friends who have called Kaitlyn Hunt a “pedophile.” That is a very strong word, which has a very specific meaning. If you want to call someone a criminal, a pervert, a creep or a sex offender, OK, but “pedophile” has a diagnostic quality that is inappropriate except where there is evidence of a persistent or obsessive interest in young children. The word “ephebophile” has been used for those whose ideé fixe is adolescents, but again, this requires evidence of a persistent tendency and, in discussing these phenomena, we should distinguish between the criminal act and the perverse interest. More from “Emily”:

It seemed to me that since I’d courted the attention, that I was fully culpable. What teenager believes she is not mentally or emotionally capable of full consent? I thought I was an adult, although when I look at the picture of myself from the time period above, I see a child.
I thought I was the exception for these men, the girl so precocious and advanced that it superseded social norms. I thought that I was “older than my chronological age.”
It never occurred to me as a young sexually active teen that the adult men I had relationships with may have been manipulating me, that they had designs and motives I couldn’t see from my limited child’s perspective. . . .

Here she is exactly on target. Any two people having sex together may have different motives. At 14, quite honestly, some girls are about as emotionally mature as they’ll ever be, and more emotionally mature than any adult who wants to have sex with a 14-year-old. But the guy who flatters her by telling her she is exceptional, in order to manipulate her into satisfying his own lusts, is taking advantage of her vulnerability — and also taking advantage of his own clandestine access to her.

“Emily” says she was meeting these guys in different circumstances, but you can be sure that the one thing her adult “boyfriends” never did was to offer to pick her up at her house, meet her parents and ask them, “Do you mind if I do your daughter in the mouth?”

Once, I met a 28-year-old man online and went to his house for a “date.” He began to undress me almost immediately — I went along with it because I wanted him to like me, and our sexual encounter culminated with him holding my head down and ejaculating into my throat while I sputtered and struggled to pull away. Later, I couldn’t understand why he never called me again, why he didn’t want to be my boyfriend. . . .

Because you are a dirty, dirty girl, that’s why.

Am I “blaming the victim” here? No. Am I trying to excuse the actions of this 28-year-old who so brutally used “Emily”? No.

What I am saying is that sympathy isn’t very helpful in the kind of situation described by “Emily.” She frankly admits she was compelled by her own need to have sex with somebody, in order to assuage her own emotional insecurities. The fact that the guys who took advantage of her compulsion were selfish creeps is scarcely surprising, and adult men visiting the “13yo girl home alone” online chat room are certainly likely to be very bad men. “Emily” is actually lucky she wasn’t kidnapped or murdered. But one way or the other, she just had to be getting banged by somebody, and the fact she was “cruelly taunted” by boys her own age makes her different from other awkward adolescent girls . . . how?

Attempting to ease the emotional pain of your chubby adolescence by “proving” your attractiveness as a teenage temptress doesn’t qualify you for special sympathy, or otherwise every fat girl in seventh grade would be doing the same and claiming victimhood.

By law, indeed, she is a victim, just like Kaitlyn Hunt’s underage girlfriend is a victim. But the importance of prosecuting such criminals — and I’ve been denounced as cruelly vindictive in this regard — does not require me or anyone else to ignore the equal importance of grown-ups telling horny teenagers to keep their britches on.

And there are such things as horny teenagers, sources say.

Allegations of hot-to-trot teenage girls with large, bouncy breasts — well, according to reliable sources, freshmen flute players at high school band camp have at times failed to heed parental warnings about the kind of dangerous hoodlum boys who play trombone.

‘Why Don’t You Have a Seat Over There?’

Sigmund Freud was wrong about a lot of things, but his separation of personality into ego, id and superego is a useful analytic tool. If our ego is our conscious, rational self, the id is that anarchistic irrational impulse that grabbed hold of Hunter S. Thompson’s imagination as he watched those UNLV coeds jiggling past his Cadillac in that Maryland Parkway crosswalk. (The geography checks out, FWIW.)

Hunter S. Thompson was a man profoundly in tune with his id, but the fact that he didn’t end up in federal prison doesn’t mean that any ordinary human being who gets in touch with his id is to be pitied for suffering the usual consequences of such crimes.

Listen too eagerly to your id, and after a while your ego is likely to start trying to rationalize those deviant anti-social impulses.

Next thing you know, you’ll be logging into some online chat room and ignoring the voice of sanity, which warns you that any hot-to-trot teenager online is actually either (a) an undercover FBI agent, or (b) an assistant producer for Dateline NBC.

Hey, fool, that’s your own fault, OK? Are there real-life hot-to-trot teenagers seeking companionship online? Maybe, but if you’re fool enough to try it, don’t call me to bail you out of jail. And even if you do find a real teenager online, you still might end up in prison, and should.

If your id seizes hold of your ego that way, there will be no sympathy for you, because your superego — that is to say, your moral sense, your conscience — was telling you all along that this was not merely a risky adventure, but also profoundly wrong.

Your superego, in the Freudian view, is what compels the ego to suppress the chaotic impulses of the id, and this results in the beneficial effect that Freud called “sublimation.” Impulses which would be dangerous if we were to give free rein to them, in the manner of a hoodlum trombone player at band camp, can become the driving force of high achievement if we suppress these impulses and channel them into constructive socially-approved activity. Sexually frustrated teenagers may not be legally responsible for their actions, but teenagers are capable of heeding either id or superego, of choosing between good and evil.

As for myself, I eventually gave up the trombone, learned how to play a few chords on guitar, and am responsible for whatever evil thereafter may have hypothetically ensued.

There was no Internet back then, no cell phones or digital cameras. So I never did anything wrong, as far as you know, and if some of my ex-girlfriends were pathological liars . . . Dude, I’m a victim.

Also, I was a Democrat at the time.

My lack of sympathy for criminals and feminists may seem irrational, but trust me, it’s far more rational than you could ever imagine. These perverts and weirdos are dangerous. As a parent, I’d never want any of my kids to get mixed up with horny flute players or trombone-playing hoodlums. The reasons for this grown-up parental caution are between me and the Lord. And I have the right to remain silent.

Category: Crime, Fear. Loathing., Sex

Comments

86 Responses to “Victims of the Id: There But for the Grace of God Go … Hey, Maybe You, Not Me!”

Nan
September 2nd, 2013 @ 9:36 pm

So like Emily blaming her distant father. I wasn’t raised with a Christian world view and didn’t become debauched so don’t blame it on the lack of Christian worldview.
Finrod Felagund
September 2nd, 2013 @ 9:49 pm

Enh, I was a trombonist, and I was a virgin until I was 22.

Speaking of trombones, there was this street musician guy playing a trombone on Peachtree Street the whole weekend right where it could be heard from a large number of the DragonCon hotel rooms. It wasn’t so much that he was even playing as late as 10pm at night– it was that he didn’t seem to know more than just the beginning of any of the stuff that he was playing. After about the 58th time of hearing just the first nine notes of Darth Vader’s theme, for example, I was extremely tempted to write out the whole thing in sheet music form along with some other songs he was butchering and say “PLEASE go away and don’t come back until you can play the ENTIRE SONG”.
RS
September 2nd, 2013 @ 9:53 pm

I don’t think TLK is arguing that the absence of a Christian world view is a guarantee of a life like the young lady profiled in the post. Indeed, having a Christian world view is no guarantee of avoiding such a life. However, a transcendent morality does provide an argument contra to society’s encouragement, which materialism does not provide.
unknown jane
September 2nd, 2013 @ 10:04 pm

And we no longer have such men (their ranks thin daily) because we have not only let down those girls, but we have created young men who are monsters of self-entitlement as well. When soccer mommy acts so rapturous over little Trevor managing to kick the ball for once as she likely did the first time he managed potty in a place other than his nappy, we have to question just what sort of men we are creating out of our sons.
I would hope that at least some people in society would not only aspire to not have their daughters turn out to be “that girl” but work to have their boys not become “those boys” as well.

For the good of everyone, and most of all their kids.
Dianna Deeley
September 2nd, 2013 @ 10:13 pm

Oh, what do we expect, when we raise girls who have no concept of “boys must prove they are worthy of me!”?

Anne of Green Gables gave nothing away – she was proud and capable, and successful on her own. How is it that she’s not the role model, but Brigid Jones, who seems to spend a great deal of her time drunk or hungover?
JRose1965
September 2nd, 2013 @ 10:25 pm

RT @SantaisaSMOKER: http://t.co/ahM53XoecP Will the brilliance from @rsmccain ever end? I think not.
Wombat_socho
September 2nd, 2013 @ 10:28 pm

I thought the whole point of Bridget Jones was that she was pitiful. Guess I ought to…no, not re-reading that.
Kirby McCain
September 2nd, 2013 @ 11:08 pm

The Westin is a bit of a reach even for a trombone.
Kirby McCain
September 2nd, 2013 @ 11:15 pm

I knew this one woman who was a horrible drunk. She also had four daughters. Very sad.
Kirby McCain
September 2nd, 2013 @ 11:18 pm

And every time I hear Hunt’s attorney say consent I get a strong urge to go down there and beat her soundly about the head and shoulders.
Bob Belvedere
September 2nd, 2013 @ 11:30 pm

Heh…

http://thecampofthesaints.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/stacy-mccain-gonzo-04b-233.jpg
Colorado Alex
September 2nd, 2013 @ 11:56 pm

I remember one bar in El Paso that I went to with an NCO of mine. He points out a cute red-head and says, “Avoid her. She and her mom are trouble.”
Kirby McCain
September 2nd, 2013 @ 11:59 pm

Hypothetically, you were girl crazy.

Hypothetically, the girls were crazy.

And if our kids did any of that crap. The beating would not be hypothetical.
Steve Skubinna
September 3rd, 2013 @ 12:12 am

I think TLK’s point is that, if you abandon the Christian worldview and never bother to fill the ethical void, you are adrift.

Whatever works for you. But giving up faith for nihilism is a bad bargain.
Kirby McCain
September 3rd, 2013 @ 12:27 am

I was in Mexico and this girl was dancing and I asked a buddy, ‘how old is she? ‘ He tells me, thirteen. It was time to go.

When people in this country talk about poverty they’ve probably never seen it. If these academic know it alls saw first hand what goes on with kids in some of these other countries they just might change their tune.
trangbang68
September 3rd, 2013 @ 12:50 am

Sad story, but i got to say I’d like to beat the crap out of the 28 year old who used and abused that little girl. What a sorry little fa**ot
Becca Lower
September 3rd, 2013 @ 1:01 am

Except certain parents with the surnames Hunt, Smith or some combination thereof.
Debra Lafave, Take Off the Ankle Bracelet, All is Forgiven! | Regular Right Guy
September 3rd, 2013 @ 2:53 am

[…] being linked by Robert Stacy McCain in his article ‘Victims of the Id: There But for the Grace of God Go … Hey, Maybe You, Not Me! Victims of the Id: …‘ I feel the need to clarify my position on female offenders such as Debra Lafave. My use of […]
robertstacymccain
September 3rd, 2013 @ 3:30 am

I was a trombonist, and I was a virgin until I was 22.

Well, there goes that stereotype. But girls who play the flute — c’mon, am I right or what?
Finrod Felagund
September 3rd, 2013 @ 4:18 am

Of course, I may just be the exception that proves the rule. (I tend to be an exception to the rule more often than not.) I had a college friend who was a trombonist and he was definitely the kind of guy that parents warn their daughters about. Not a sleaze, but a country boy that was particularly good at getting women into bed with him, from what I understand.

However, karmic justice came his way: he married a schoolteacher and had three daughters of his own.
Finrod Felagund
September 3rd, 2013 @ 4:25 am

It was all too very audible from the 15th floor of the Int’l tower of the Hyatt, sadly.
Quartermaster
September 3rd, 2013 @ 6:49 am

Very wise decision.
tlk244182
September 3rd, 2013 @ 7:40 am

Thanks. I dont blame my parents. Presumably the Prodigal Son had good parents. Look where he wound up. I’m just saying there were few effective barriers around what I think the law calls an attractive nuisance, and that my parents were unaware either of the nuisance or the value of the barriers. I was trying to follow the point about nonfeasance being potentially as bad as maleficence.
tlk244182
September 3rd, 2013 @ 9:07 am

I agree that not all materialists will pattern their lives after Jim Morrison. I was trying to emphasize the plight of the 120,000 in Nineveh who cannot distinguish their right from their left (of which I was one,) and that someone is responsible for trying to smack some sense into them, usually their parents. Ezekiel 3:18-19 (…require his blood at the hand of the watchmen). I did not fail to notice that the wicked man still dies for his sin, i.e. is still responsible even if his parents don’t teach him properly.
tlk244182
September 3rd, 2013 @ 9:17 am

Yes. Thanks.
RS
September 3rd, 2013 @ 9:25 am

Spot-on. I remember two things about the birth of my eldest. First, she was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Second, I thought, “Holy crap! I’m now responsible for rearing another human being and safeguarding her eternal soul.
Then I threw up.

Unfortunately, we live in a world where children are an accessory to the rest of one’s life, to be displayed along with their trophies and school awards next to the Wedgewood china and the Queen Anne desk you found at that antique store on Martha’s Vineyard. Yes, ultimately our children are responsible for themselves. That does not, however, relieve us of our responsibilty to rear them the way we should.
Bob Belvedere
September 3rd, 2013 @ 9:40 am

THIS.
RS
September 3rd, 2013 @ 10:00 am

You are absolutely correct that boys seem to be ignored in these discussions, and I speak as the father of two of them. Certainly, there must be instruction from a father who himself is worthy of respect, but also, it requires an example in the form of the father’s respect and love for his wife, the sons’ mother. Actions speak louder than words, as they say. Scratch a child with problems, and most of the time, you’ll find an absent or uninterested father in my view. And removing fathers from the familial instruction equation is at the heart of modern Feminism, if not all of Progressivism.
Kirby McCain
September 3rd, 2013 @ 10:05 am

Well, Dragon*Con finally got rid of Kramer. Is he a pedophile? Again as Jesse Stone would say, know can’t prove. That man deserves no pity.
Quartermaster
September 3rd, 2013 @ 11:20 am

If only. If only.
Dungeonmaster Jim
September 3rd, 2013 @ 11:28 am

A man can rarely go wrong by keeping it in his pants.
Finrod Felagund
September 3rd, 2013 @ 2:41 pm

Yeah, the Kramer situation was an awkward position for DC. He hadn’t been involved in any decisions there for more than a decade, but he still had a financial stake in it, which was galling to many people.
mVespa1
September 3rd, 2013 @ 11:24 pm

RT @rsmccain: @mVespa1 @Gabby_Hoffman @DanielleRSaul @crousselle @AM_Hoffman Good Girls Don’t http://t.co/wRpPC25Jz3
yidwithlid
September 3rd, 2013 @ 11:25 pm

RT @rsmccain: @mVespa1 @Gabby_Hoffman @DanielleRSaul @crousselle @AM_Hoffman Good Girls Don’t http://t.co/olA19z1EFC
unknown jane
September 4th, 2013 @ 8:51 am

Anne of Green Gables would be shunted aside and called a “loser” (and worse — like “Blue spherical objects”) to the point that she either gave up and put out (at which point she would be jeered at some more) or she would be just shunted aside and bullied altogether.
I’ve seen girls who try to be as you say, and the treatment they get is merciless; I have seen boys who try to act honorably — and they usually get accused of being “faggots”, and are treated just as mercilessly.
At some point we have to realize that we have put our young people in one heck of a poisonous bind. They are damned all the way around no matter what they do — by their peers, by their elders, by society…if we want them to behave in a different fashion, then we need to be willing to act that way ourselves (let’s be very honest: the adults are hardly acting as proper role models anymore, now are they? kind of hypocritical of us to be casting stones considering the way we act, no?).
If society’s elders want to preach and teach (their traditional job by the way) then they have to regain the moral high ground — and we have lost it to a goodly extent.
Our gardens need landscaping — one and all.
unknown jane
September 4th, 2013 @ 9:01 am

Exactly. That many men were more than happy to go along with this angers me no end.
I consider it more of a hippie thing, as the concept of feminism and progressivism are not in and of themselves totally wrong concepts. I rather like being able to vote and hold property, and I rather enjoy my country — but the hippie bs (which is actually far older than the ’60s by the way) has really done a number on all the above!