If I'm honest, I have to concede the average TRA is pretty unequivocal in their condemnation when the paedo-advocates speak. But then, a lot also slips under the radar. Even when other people activate the sirens -
Still, I'm well past the point of believing the chant-miming ideologues are in fact aware of what they support. This is a problem for those who choose their political masters based on popularity, pretty colours, soundbites and spin, and it isn't getting better.
We were recently treated to another of those semi-viral paedophile sting videos, and I guess part of the reason for its viral-popularity was the holy fucking show of the man involved.
Yes, this elderly nonce, the filthy old tortoise, was a man of the cloth - you know, the magic rainbow sky cloth, that brings light, love and inclusion to the world?
The one that's gathered a full Chinese alphabet of additional characters and now includes vast swathes of heterosexual - but not like other heterosexual - people?
You Have To Include Everyone Or The Sky Cloth Won't Magic
The LGBTQIAA2S-A-Zþ+7⁴☆etc liberation movement had to individualise themselves, en-mass, because not being recognised is genocide. So they decided sex isn't binary, and yet the vast majority of people are so uniformly binary they align with their sex and accordant stereotypes, AKA gender. They're just normal. Easily pigeon-holed - cis-hets.
But those outside and above these arbitrary (but very relevant and you must use the word 'cis' to identify yourself) definitions have a wildly different experience, due to their multifaceted nature and scope of feeling. The non-binaries, genderfluids, queers, the 'not cis'.
Renegades, if you will.
And the spicy straight was born. It was a heady time of calling women TERFs and literal fascists, asserting your indifference to the exposed penises of strangers (if you were 'assigned female' especially) and collecting / constructing oppression points between sessions of chin-stroking pomposity.
Gay Means Happy; Queer Means Very Super-Duper Special
Entirely heterosexual women claimed their sexuality and / or gender was 'queer' because they don't really identify with the average, boring woman. Typically, all normal women want is to have babies, arrange flowers and be pretty, finding their sexual needs are in fact best attended to by cooking wholesome family meals and keeping a beautiful home.
To me, it was reminiscent of when the barcode tattoo on the back of the neck took off. Suddenly, every dickhead at those radio roadshow events was a maverick outsider, consumed with a heavy scathing of neo-lib economics, the dehumanism of commodification and a burning fury about ecocide, consumerism and hyper-capitalism. All these deeply principled, post apocalyptic cyberpunks, all of whom once had a spare £30 and a crazy idea.
These people now make up a good one-to-two thirds of the flag. Because no one worth knowing wants normalcy. It's very inclusive - you might be a bog-standard sexist git with a beard, interests in tech, Top Gear and porn. You may have an enduring attraction to giddy, vapid young women with big tits, BUT you do love it when they're bi, don't you? That's not straight. And you wore some guy-liner back in the day, yeah? Well, you my friend can be queer.
Spicy straight. A brilliant new lipstick-lesbian trend, for when lesbianism is so degraded, men in teeshirts bearing the words 'I'm a Lesbian Stuck in a Man's Body' are no longer a grim, pitiful joke.
And with this come the others - the foot fetishists, the furries; the asexuals and demisexuals (these are people who enjoy sex but not when they're sick, or with someone they can't stand and consider ugly, only when they want to etc) and the straight men who like to dress in ladies' clothing to decompress. By wanking.
Paedophile Hunters
I'm often wary of vigilante collectives. Partly because kudos can become the driving force.
It can put major investigations at risk, tipping off gangs to destroy evidence. That always has to be a concern, especially with live streaming.
It's also intuitively obvious this is in itself a great performative cover for sex offenders. All the overt movements against paedophiles are vulnerable to this, especially if they involve confrontation. Look at the EDL.
I served a group of really unpleasant men in a cafe as a teen.
They read especially grotty tabloids, (The Sport) and spent some time cursing nonces over breakfast. They considered the lowering of the gay age of consent to 18 a paedo conspiracy by homo peers. Sarah Payne had just been abducted and murdered, they blamed her utterly heartbroken and entirely innocent dad, because he apparrently didn't show the anger they believed he should.
This, all the while ogling the girl featured in the week leading to her 16th birthday, with an item of clothing removed each day.
These men are everywhere, and rarely far from a woman happy to defend them.
Yet, of those paedophile hunter videos I've seen, I've been impressed with the way they handle this extremely antagonistic circumstance, their knowledge of the law and sensitivity with innocent family members etc.
If there was any deterrent capable of stifling the apparently irrepressible need these men feel to abuse kids, I suppose it would be something like this - public confrontation with an unflinching recital of the facts. Broadcast and shared by anyone who feels like it. Forever.
Shame and social humiliation are underrated. More crushing and evergreen than violence is the undelivered, looming potential for violence.
Which all makes it instinctively tempting, and maybe it works as deterrent for the novice, but they don't work for the invested - by which I mean, anyone beyond a sick curiosity. There's a reason 'exclusion' evokes so much hand-wringing - not so long ago, it was a death sentence. Like a thousand paper cuts, loneliness kills. We all know this. But it's not an answer - every single action we take appears to make them more, not less, dangerous.
Isolation creates unknown dangers with nothing to lose. When they get to know people, they manipulate them and abuse their children. Harsher punishments make higher stakes. They just need to be in jail. Forever.
No potential for rehabilitation is worth the potential of relapse.
Sympathy for the Devil
It's fascinating to watch these confrontations when they're done well. In the case of David Griffiths AKA "Penny Price" AKA "Mabel Mint", all is unravelled by Izzy.
Griffiths' ludicrous, attention-grabbing wig, trowelled-on foundation, his lurid eyeshadow, it almost obscures his face, but at first he looks shocked and fearful.
For some reason, I choose to imagine myself cornered, filmed and broadcast. I can almost feel a relatability - as a former drug addict, the idea of being caught is a prospect I spent years fearing. As a child who was abused, I've always carried a dark, guilty feeling of shame. No matter the vastly different antecedents, if I try, I can initially find a shred of theoretical common ground, at first impression anyway. But then you watch, and listen.
All that forced empathy, my masochistic, concerted effort to imagine myself in the shoes of a man who's world is, I'm guessing, crashing down, is abruptly met with a 360° wall of reality, slamming down like a cookie cutter, unfalteringly severing at once any 'benefit of the doubt' suspension of disbelief, imaginary leeway and room to manoeuvre charitable delusion.
Even the notion his world is crashing down is a pivotal mistake - these people appear impervious to normal shame, devoid of anything beyond a smarmy, audacious resilience to the consequences. They fundamentally do not believe they've done wrong. They just don't.
Izzy spoke after the sting on how insidious she found Griffiths' method of grooming. The team know for a fact a minimum of three real-life children have been targeted by him, being pressured, coerced, groomed into sending explicit pictures of themselves.
He had a detailed awareness of the law and how far inappropriate chat legally can go (way too fucking far). It was disturbing to hear Izzy explain that he was perplexed when, despite having groomed their decoy for weeks, he still couldn't get any indecent images from her. Disturbing, because with real children he'd got them, easily, fast.
It was, said Izzy, a bombardment of messages filled with controlling language - "I let you see your friends" "I let you go out". He stepped in like a strict parent, but of course without concern, limits or responsibility. The scope for probable harm is deeply troubling.
I was a profoundly unhappy and lonely child, isolated to a degree that is difficult to convey. I would have easily become absorbed by online interaction and dread to think what a scheming paedophile could have done to me. How close - omniscient, even - they may appear to be. Or the panic that sets in when you realise it's all gone too far, and you're scared, and trapped in a situation you believe you brought on yourself.
Griffith's image, an alter ego - 'Auntie' or 'Mummy' Penny (🤢) was integral to this. It comes with a gratis, assumed back story that doesn't need preamble or mention until it's useful, replete with a well of suffering to hide in. Just google it - there's a plethora of stories of lifelong repression, the consequent pain, all with supporting evidence (albeit with shambolic, risible foundations). There are now reasons to be secretive, because transphobia is everywhere and you must never out anyone. Akin to murder, that is.
What does it matter is someone is male or female anyway? Poor Penny, with his untapped wisdom and titanium-strength 'vulnerability' shield.
During the confrontation, the shocked and fearful expression began to give way. His miserable, thin lips shrunk back even further into a tight, spiteful scowl; his chin jutted out with indignant contempt. He muttered discontentedly and turned his head away with an air of superiority. Eyes rolled upwards with distain and apparent tedium.
When they first tackled him over the fact he'd received indecent images from children, he quietly and instantly replied "I'll delete them". It was supposed to look weak, frail, and contrite - mournful, even. But the act was gone now, there was no point. Best to try it with the police and courts, not this nosy cow trying to condemn him.
He argued and tried to control the conversation, quibbling minor points, anything to divert attention from the revelations he'd sent indecent images to children, all dressed up, cock in hand. Yes, his wife knew he was chatting to children online, he spat. There's no qualms implicating her. He'd throw his or your children under the bus without a second's thought. Don't imagine his wife is important.
The feeling that within Griffiths an internal dialogue was unleashing misogynistic obscenity directed at Izzy was hard to shift. She didn't understand the reason for these chats or what they meant to them, they cared about each other goddammit.
As if it was a gotcha, he revealed one of the children he was known to have groomed was now dead. A fact he himself volunteered, as if to bolster the defence that in reality he was just counselling these scared and troubled girls.
I don't know anything more on this, why the girl is dead, was it an accident, illness? Predicted or a shock?
Griffiths wanted to talk about it, but Izzy shut it down straight away. I guess he has used it for capital at some point, his supposed grief, and I suspect someone else, probably a parent, was to be blamed.
Lock up your children because a thousand and more are still roaming. The knowledge the poor kid was even aware of his existence sent me into a new stratosphere of rage and disgust. What had he done? I think we can be fairly sure that whatever it was, he did not enrich her last weeks of life. They pick the loneliest children and at no point do they cease investigating their lives to flush out anyone with good intent, patrolling borders, leaving a piss trail to claim the child as their territory.
Did 'Penny' Exist to Facilitate Child Grooming?
The idea this female persona is not the result of porn addicted, escalating fetishism and an expedient vehicle to access children, evading the suspicions of barely present adults (because it's just an old woman the child is talking to, aye?), and confound normal boundaries: it is ludicrously naive.
We tend to think of these men as being 'trans' as the result of genuine dysphoria or cynical appropriation. We forget, all too often, about the undeniable fetishism that is cross-dressing. With that in the mix, I would say it's a perfect storm. A chicken and egg. A tapestry, an ever tighter twisting spiral of perverse and malevolent intent.
Over the last two years I don't know how many examples I've seen of men deep in the throes of porn sickness, escalating into the extreme degradation of 'sissification' and all of the taboo smashing, boundary-violating delight in offensiveness that comes with it.
Jonathan Lea, AKA Emma Bella Puttana, was a solicitor.
But somewhere along the line his trajectory diverted, he had a new vocation; whoring himself, advertising his 'bareback' services on Facebook, spunk on his face. He targeted a decoy he believed to be a child, telling her he had raped a six and seven year old. Sending images and film, the paedophile hunter's voice shook as he explained he believed Lea himself had created them, and while he never opened them, the thumbnails had haunted him and kept him awake at night.
Or Shaun Hawkes, who was young and average looking. His parents were probably working class, had worked hard and done alright. A builder, roofer, tree surgeon - something like that.
From the outside, it was almost as if his persona 'Gabrielle' was the stronger half of a split personality, powerful enough to possess and subvert him.
'Gabrielle' who boasted of being randomly fucked by strangers in the darkness of London park benches, and bombarded children with pornography, videos of himself sucking men off, trying to phone them up in the middle of the night. As Gabrielle, who's Facebook account was unequivocally Shaun in bad makeup, he relished being sexually explicit in this diary of madness that lay open to anyone who saw it. He claimed he had sex with his own mother - he said this to what he believed was a kid, who loved ponies. Ponies he also said he wanted to suck off. It's unimaginable what his mother has gone through, as her apparently normal son was unmasked like a Scooby Doo villain.
Claire Goodier. Wendy Jones. Dawn Love. Vikki Green. Ella Davies. Abbi Tarling. Roger Spackman. Denen Anderson. Chloe Thompson. Anthony Scales. Melody Maelstrom - there are endless examples. Men who fall into a sexual psychosis, wanking their way into an abyss of ever-escalating depravity, a demolition derby of all that distinguishes humans as evolved or civilised. It's a bizarre supremacy of sex, that inverts ethics and decency, placing the most grotesque or offensive at the apex of sexual fantasy and everything below that as defiled by normalcy. Vanilla. 'Cis'.
No one wants to be that.
You bet the LGBTQIA2S ++ is expanding.
The presentation or claim to be trans isn't just a decoy, charade or tactic of opportunism. Thanks to the success of the trans 'get out of jail' card, it is certainly cynically adopted. But these men are infected with a disease, and porn is the vector, if not the pathogen.
Swiftly moving through the first rungs of taboo - taking risks, exposing and endangering themselves - they become just a tool in their own progressively debauched, brutal obsession. Paedophilia is an obvious next step - if not already present. The most common shared paraphilia within paedophiles is AGP / transvestic disorder. The same goes for murderers and rapists.
Paedophile film collections are frequently found to contain torture, humiliation and bestiality. Sometimes necrophilia. It's a race to the depths of depravity and debasement that transfixes and captivates them. They'll drag anyone and anything into the quicksand of their new frontiers to outrage against. Their sexuality has been volunarily weaponized against them, and they fall into a never ending quest for more and darker norms to overthrow.
I wouldn't trust them with a goldfish.
Paedophile hunter izzy was an impeccable mix of furious and controlled, ending the confrontation with "We didn't bring this to your doorstep, you did. Stay away from children."
Griffiths denied the police would know who he was. Maybe, a couple of commenters suggested, after a lifetime of suppressing his true self, his concept of what is and is not appropriate or acceptable was skewed. People even claim that this is a latent girlhood escaping the pressure chamber of denial. He never had a girlhood. Didn't all of us engage in explicit conversations as our sexuality emerged?
As it transpired, at first from Reduxx, Griffiths was actually found to be a key member of a paedophile gang twenty years ago. He and two other men ran a pen pal messaging service, where child abuse imagery was traded and sold. He pleaded guilty to eleven counts of distributing indecent materials and asked for a staggering one hundred and eight additional charges to be considered.
One of his co-accused, Graham McLeod, was particularly brazen in his enjoyment of child abuse. The reason the gang was caught in the first place was due to McLeod sexually abusing a child. He was serving a prison sentence at the time of the trial, where the judge decided the better way manage these men's near infanticidal desires was in the community. You know - where the children are.
And just five years before that Griffiths was found to be smuggling and reproducing porn - some 'borderline paedophilic', some involving bestiality. Are we really to believe he has done nothing in the interval?
Since our authorities don't seem to catch anywhere near enough of these men, I guess paedophile hunters are among the best controls we have
These men never change.
I have one thing in common with McLeod, Griffiths' co-conspirator: I don't believe that paedophiles can be cured. I once pictured two kinds of people - psychopaths or sadists,
and those who experienced intrusive, sexual thoughts they despised and fought to resist. As if it was an unwanted, and organic, sexuality. But what sexuality depends on the object of desire being powerless, hurt, and incapable of emotional, physical or mental parity? To never want a sexual partner you can talk to? That is a sickness in and of itself. This is sadism - all of it is.
Now, I see more people - almost entirely male - as caught in an ever-steeper descent into a dissociative state, powered by porn and centred upon the eroticism of destruction. I always wondered what it was about male sexuality that made the repulsive (cruelty, shit eating, gross-out degradation) so apparently common in porn.
As if they were infected with zombie ant fungus, a death march into destruction, they lose themselves in the drive to defile.
Of course they meet the criterion of 'queer', that last word heard by innumerable gay men as they were beaten to death. They certainly are not straight, or cis. This is queer theory, remember. The underdog should always have primacy, the oppressor is the accepted and normal.
It might make you wonder, what the brave gay pride movement was fighting for, if not to be regular men, women and parents. To not have their sexuality deemed front, centre, and weird. But that bit is over now, the new frontier is gender and outrage and fitting in by joining the madness. No one wants to be vanilla.
