The ICK factor rides again.

Lisa Graas has links to a story at the Daily Caller that has to be read to be believed:

If a small group of psy­chi­a­trists and other men­tal health pro­fes­sion­als have their way at a con­fer­ence this week, pedophiles them­selves could play a role in remov­ing pedophilia from the Amer­i­can Psy­chi­atric Association’s bible of men­tal ill­nesses — the Diag­nos­tic and Sta­tis­ti­cal Man­ual of Men­tal Dis­or­ders (DSM)

Lisa as you might guess is not amused and says this in part:

The col­lec­tive con­science of a soci­ety is not, by itself, a “stan­dard”. Rather, it is “mob rule” that has no basis in any standard.

Or as I have called it often here, the ICK factor.

I first men­tioned the ICK fac­tor in the early days of the blog in an attack on Richard Cohen :

And PLEASE don’t give me the “ick” fac­tor argu­ment about these other things being accepted. Ick is just an argu­ment about cul­ture. It is the same argu­ment that one would have heard con­cern­ing gay mar­riage less that 20 years ago.

Then came the Polan­ski case:

“If I had killed some­body, it wouldn’t have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But… f — ing, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to f— young girls. Juries want to f— young girls. Every­one wants to f— young girls!”…

…This is all about try­ing to nor­mal­ize behav­ior by an elite group of peo­ple who do not want to be judged.

We then saw the press reac­tion to Polan­ski:

…in Hol­ly­wood I am not sure a 13-​year-​old is really a 13-​year-​old. Here I thought I was mak­ing an Ironic Joke and the Wash­ing­ton Post shows otherwise…

…Will the last blog­ger out the door pick up Patterico’s jaw from the floor?

Fol­lowed by John Nolte talk­ing about how Hol­ly­wood works:

And this is how cin­e­matic pro­pa­ganda works. Whether the filmmaker’s moti­va­tions are good or evil, the idea is to get decent and thought­ful peo­ple to start sec­ond guess­ing them­selves as they’re enveloped in the dark and held cap­tive by the pow­er­ful sound and fury of the mov­ing pic­ture. First we’re led to iden­tify and sym­pa­thize with a par­tic­u­lar char­ac­ter, then that char­ac­ter does some­thing designed to chal­lenge our belief struc­ture. This can range from, “If John Wayne opposes racism, maybe I should,” to, “Well, if a lov­ing mother is okay with it, maybe I need to get a lit­tle more nuanced and tol­er­ant about this whole child-​rape thing.”

On its face, that may sound laugh­able, and maybe it is, but that doesn’t mean our eyes are lying to us. Last year merely topped off a cam­paign tar­geted at our chil­dren that began some time ago.

In that post I didn’t include his exam­ples, but in this post I will.

In 2006’s “Notes on a Scan­dal,” Acad­emy Award win­ner Cate Blanchett plays a school teacher engaged in a steamy sex­ual affair with one of her stu­dents. Like “The Reader,” the sex scenes between a mature woman and her stu­dent strive for the erotic and never once does the story stop to exam­ine how such a destruc­tive affair might psy­cho­log­i­cally affect a teen-​aged boy. That same year, in “Lit­tle Chil­dren,” Jackie Earle Haley was Oscar-​nominated for his sup­port work as a moles­ter just released from prison who’s the vic­tim of that favorite Hol­ly­wood whip­ping boy, sub­ur­ban hypocrisy. Just two years ear­lier, Kevin Bacon’s heroic moles­ter in “The Woods­man” not only saves the day and wins the pretty girl, but in his valiant strug­gle to “reform” he’s pre­sented as a kind of “civil rights” metaphor as police­men and “intol­er­ant” co-​workers tor­ment him.

The award for Most Unset­tling, how­ever, must go to 2004’s “Birth,” where Acad­emy Award win­ner Nicole Kid­man stars as a widow con­vinced her dead hus­band has returned in the form of a 10 year-​old boy. If watch­ing a near-​forty year-​old woman exchange long­ing looks with a lit­tle kid isn’t creepy enough, wait till they end up naked in a bath­tub together.

And now we see yet another attempt to move the ICK fac­tor goal posts by the elites of the nation:

Researchers from Har­vard Uni­ver­sity, the Johns Hop­kins Uni­ver­sity, the Uni­ver­sity of Louisville, and the Uni­ver­sity of Illi­nois will be among the pan­elists at the conference.

My point? I’m not sur­prised one bit and nor should any­one who has been pay­ing atten­tion over the last 3 – 4 decades. The ques­tion is will this be the final trig­ger for the lat­est Great Awak­en­ing or in the final decline of American/​Western society?

I tend to be an opti­mist and I believe we will see the for­mer over the latter.

Update: I’m sur­prised that the con­fer­ence has not got­ten much media cov­er­age, and nei­ther has this:

“I can tell you that the No. 1 prob­lem in Hol­ly­wood was and is and always will be pedophilia. That’s the biggest prob­lem for chil­dren in this indus­try. … It’s the big secret,” Feld­man said.

The “cast­ing couch,” which is the old Hol­ly­wood ref­er­ence to actors being expected to offer sex for roles, applied to chil­dren, Feld­man said. “Oh, yeah. Not in the same way. It’s all done under the radar,” he said.

“I was sur­rounded by [pedophiles] when I was 14 years old. … Didn’t even know it. It wasn’t until I was old enough to real­ize what they were and what they wanted … till I went, Oh, my God. They were every­where,” Feld­man, 40, said.

Now I’d think this would be a pretty big story, wouldn’t you, yet it is going nowhere. Why? Dave Piere has one answer

So here is a claim of mas­sive abuse and cover-​ups hap­pen­ing in Hol­ly­wood. Where is the major media on this?

Nearly a week after the episode aired, the response to Feldman’s alarm­ing claims has been almost non-​existent in the major media. While the Boston Globe and the New York Times have hyper­ven­ti­lated over decades-​old alle­ga­tions of abuse by Catholic priests (many of which were all-​too-​true), nei­ther paper ded­i­cated even a drop of ink to Feldman’s shocker.

Could it be that major media folks do not wish to dig too deep into this story and upset one of their largest sources of income?

But the Catholic League has the right answer:

So we have pro­fes­sion­als who seek to nor­mal­ize pedophilia, and a Hol­ly­wood milieu in which it thrives, and few seem to care. In other words, when the sec­u­lar elite pro­mote, or oth­er­wise engage in, child molesta­tion, it really doesn’t mat­ter. It only mat­ters if the sicko is Fr. Murphy.

That’s pretty much it.