> "He regularly and repeatedly makes comments about “the dishonest law that labels sex with adolescents as ‘rape’ even if they are willing.”
I'm a gay man who is into older men.
When I was in highschool I intentionally sought out men in their 20s and 30s.
Cross generational relationships are a sexual preference and can be just as fulfilling and last just as long as any other.
Sometimes the younger person has more money and is the one paying for everything. Really. I should know. I've been that younger person. It's really just like any other relationship. We laugh, love, and have deep meaningful emotional connections.
These antiquated stereotypes of a mustache twirling abusive old pervert preying on the naive country bumpkin has to go.
The vast majority simply aren't like that. There's creeps, sure, but there's creepy people everywhere.
A 17 year old in love with a 30 year old shouldn't come with secrecy, shame and judgemental speculation. I had enough of that when I was young.
Let us emerge from the shadows. We've been here all along.
RMS is saying there shouldn't be prison sentences for love. Abuse is a relationship dynamic, not a function of the age of the participants.
Hit me up if you want to have me fired over my sexual orientation as well, email info is on my contact page. I'll mail you my manager's info.
I would agree somewhere there is a threshold where abuse can reasonably be assumed. But abuse has to be the thing demonstrated for the crime and not merely the age of the participants.
I agree those implications sound shocking, but please read on:
When it comes to criminality, we need to stay focused on the abuse and manipulation and not be distracted by ages or any other correlative relationship. Going over the line of consent is the trespass we all agree upon.
Such hyper-vigilance will permit us to pursue the true sentiments and goals of metoo and cancel culture, to rout out systems and institutions of abuse. All kinds.
For instance, a 10 year old with a 40 year old late at night at a park sounds like a major red flag, something we should all find unacceptable.
What if it's a basketball coach waiting for a parent who's running late?
The point of that redirection story is that abuse and manipulation is what needs to be demonstrated, not just the mere existence of a relationship. Abuse can happen without sex at all.
Our immense paranoia of child sex predators has robbed people of their natural desires to nurture children. By assuming the worst is inevitable we have made the best impossible.
I know it's a high standard so let us all aim high.
OFC, bear in mind having consent low in Spain said
a lot of other terms, such as if you were 14 and
commited some serious crime, (murder for example),
you could be jailed as an adult. That got changed a few decades ago with the "Minor's Law" and not
everyone was happy because a gang composed of
minors commited one of the worst crimes ever in
Spain against slightly mentally challenged woman.
On the main theme, yes, the US is paranoid, and a lot of
people exploiting the average fear from the American:
the market and the consumering society.
I read through as many specific quotes as I could find and it all looked like your typical tenured male professor running his mouth. Is Stallman kind of creepy? I think so. Is it a good idea to explore the philosophical points of under age sex in an academic setting or in public? No, but thank the gods you are allowed to...sort of. Has he DONE anything wrong? If so, someone should notify the police.
That blog post calling for his removal was way overblown and quite childish.
I worked in a college setting for years and tenured professors were found in possession of pornography on school grounds and on school equipment. We in tech, who discovered and reported it,thought it was a big deal. Academic freedom policy and union protection gave it the big shrug. That didn't protect their reputation but it did protect their freedom.
I came to hold dear the notion of academic and intellectual freedom from my years working there. Web filtering and monitoring were completely off the table. Not because it might protect some creepy dudes from exposure but because it protects us all in ways that most people don't even fathom.
I predict that the author of that post will deeply regret their actions one day when they grow up.
They can all still grow up, I hope. But the probabilities are slim. Still, it would probably be a bad idea to ostracize all of them just because they say weird things.
> I think so. Is it a good idea to explore the philosophical points of under age sex in an academic setting or in public? No, but thank the gods you are allowed to...sort of.
Uh? No, I don't think you should be allowed to advocate for the morality of statutory rape in a university mailing list on an entirely unrelated topic. I was on some csail mailing lists and I certainly wouldn't want to get that.
And we wonder why this field is so gender lopsided.
> I expect that Sudanese law defines "rape" to exclude rape by the husband. That's comparable to US laws that define "rape" to include voluntary sex with under N years of age (where N varies). Both laws falsify the meaning of "rape".
He threatened suicide if a woman wouldn't date him. That's abusive manipulation.
He, unsolicitedly hands out 'pleasure cards' to women at conferences. That's harassment: Conferences are a interest and professional environment; they're not Tinder.
Having a bed in his office at MIT is creepy as hell. Inviting woman at MIT into his office would hence be harassment.
Women at MIT had to keep plants in their offices to ward him off. Ward off his persistent, unwanted, sexual advances. That's him causing harassment.
Those cards said "Sharing good books, good food and exotic music and dance - tender embraces - unusual sense of humor." Handing out such calling cards seems to only be classified as harassment if the man is fat.
That depends. Do you wear shirts while on teleconferences, and what art do people get subjected to?
I will also require your taste in literature, boxers or briefs, tube socks with/without the colored stripes or those ankle socks,
and toilets or bidets to make a final determination.
He also has some troubling views that at best make him an inappropriate spokesperson.
https://rms-open-letter.github.io/appendix