By Glenn T. Stanton<\/p>\n\n\n\n This academic article, and any like it, must<\/em> go down, as its clear objective is to violate children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In September, the American Sociological Association (ASA) published a 3,000-word commentary on the need to explore and de-pathologize \u201cpreadolescent children\u2019s erotic capacities.\u201d You read that precisely right. The article<\/a>, entitled \u201cChildhood Sexualities: On Pleasure and Meaning from the Margins,\u201d was published Sept. 20 in the ASA\u2019s journal Sex & Sexualities<\/em>. Its lead author is Deevia Bhana, a professor in the School of Education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the first line of the commentary\u2019s abstract, Bhana laments the following as a bad thing: \u201cSexualities scholarship marginalizes childhood sexual pleasure, positioning children as vulnerable subjects.\u201d In the second sentence she employs all the lefty jargon such an essay is built upon: \u201cThis article repositions childhood sexualities within a pleasure-centered, globally oriented, and power-aware frame informed by feminist, queer, and decolonial perspectives.\u201d Those colonizers, informed by a Christian worldview, were all hung up on protecting children<\/a> from sexual exploitation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The article\u2019s stated objective is to \u201cinterrogate dominant narratives of sexual innocence that suppress young people\u2019s desires and show how children negotiate pleasure and meaning amid intersecting hierarchies of age, race, gender, and class.\u201d Age.<\/em> Of course, the primary objective here is to advance the pervy mission<\/a> of abolishing age-of-sexual-consent protections. The author positions this as an act of human justice, because \u201cnowhere is this politics of misrecognition, erasure, and marginalization more acute than in childhood, where preadolescent children\u2019s erotic capacities are routinely pathologized.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Do not miss that she is situating the problem with people like, well, nearly everyone who has a wholly natural objection to sexualizing children. Yet she continues to invert basic human moral gravity: \u201cWhat is clear is that the notion of childhood sexual innocence is not a natural construct. It is a colonial fiction that has long erased the very thought of putting sexuality and childhood together.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n She then asks her colleagues in the academy, \u201cWhat does it mean for sociology and sexuality studies to take seriously the idea of childhood sexual pleasure and meaning from the margins?\u201d She answers her own question thusly: \u201cWhen sexual pleasure is viewed from the lives of those who are generationally minoritized, its contours shift: It appears as a practice of resistance and an arena where alternative futures are rehearsed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Given that nowhere in her commentary does she overtly establish any boundary against adult and child sexual liaisons, one must reasonably conclude she is calling for the abolition of such boundaries \u201cby bringing the margins to the center\u201d as she euphemistically terms it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Indeed, this is how this game is played.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You thankfully cannot directly assert such things in polite company, especially in a mainstream academic journal. But you can certainly chip away at the edges by claiming that \u201crejecting adult-centric\/adultist approaches to sexualities and attending to childhood pleasure is indispensable for an inclusive sociology and just sexual futures.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"children](\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Copy-of-Untitled-2025-10-14T135926.590.png\")
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