the entitlement of "ordinary men" to rape, molest, abuse

Lots of interesting information in the study released by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York about clergy sex abuse, most of it disheartening.

I know it says that there is no connection between homosexual identity and sex abuse of minors, and that is good to have the statistics to back up what we all know. Stop blaming the queers.

But the study also says this:

clergy abusers tended to be maladjusted men rather than the pathological abusers…they tended to have few victims and often committed a range of other crimes or improper behaviors, which is similar to the profile of abuse in the wider American society. “These are ordinary men,” Smith said, echoing the verdict of a 1970 study of the psychological profile of priests. (New Catholic Sex Abuse Findings: Gay Priests Are Not the Problem)

Ordinary men.

Certainly, Pope Benedict will be happy to use this idea of how modern culture corrupts, proof that his “modernity is the cause of everything bad in the world,” so that women need to stop seeking their own authority and queers need to get reverse engineered. As in the past, the Pope’s rhetoric will address declining morality among societies (that means all people, all genders) as shown through the acts of depraved men. This reminds me of how that great patriarchal architect, Sigmund Freud, developed his theory of normal human psychology by studying sexually abused young women and claiming they only fantasized about having sex with their fathers.

But I wonder if this idea of “ordinary men” says something more disturbing still. What do we teach our boys about being men, if “ordinary men” have such a sense of entitlement that they seek sexual and ego gratification even from the helpless, even at the cost of violence, because they refuse to negotiate mutual relationships?

The Church will like the notion that sexually predatory priests are just “ordinary men” — as much as Evolutionary Psychologists, I assume. The idea that men-will-be-men, that men are bred by evolution and god, apparently, to take sex wherever they can get it. Instead of this being an issue of a corrupt ideology of gender roles, it’s merely an issue of curbing excess and providing services to those entitled to something they may not deserve. The Church for one; properly-conditioned women for the other.

It’s much easier when women have reached maturity with their corrupt role message intact, so that they acquiesce to the old tale that men can’t help themselves. A woman’s self-violence and self-abuse is a blessing for an abuser. It’s what makes battered women stay in unlocked houses, what makes them accomplices to the crimes not just against themselves but against their children — from kidnappers, to sex traffickers, to genital mutilators.

But if that doesn’t get the job done, and women don’t volunteer for service, there’s always conscription into the ranks of sexual service through rape and molestation and victimization under authority of ”ordinary men.”