Peep show and the paedo sense of humor - Triggerin

[Alonso]

Peep show is a British TV show, the best comedy show I've seen in my life, hands down. I started watching it about nine years ago, and it's so good I've watched most episodes several times. It is characterized by a very dark sense of humor, and only recently I realized that virtually every episode has at least one joke about "paedos". A few years ago my English roommate told me that everybody in the UK is obsessed with paedophilia (which I imagine is a good thing), and that's the reason why jokes about paedos are everywhere.

This is one of the most shocking paedo quotes in the show:

Mark: Now I can get on and do everything I've always wanted to do, join Mensa, learn the clarinet. I could become a Scout leader.
Jeremy: [trying to hide a smirk] Mm-hm.
Mark: What are you smiling for? Look, Scouting is a noble tradition. You do not have to be a paedo to wanna work with children, all right?
Jeremy: [whispering] But it probably helps.
Mark: Oh God, that is so... I spent five happy years in the Scouts and never once...
Jeremy: You told me Kinky Layton was all over you.
Mark: Yeah, all right, Layton was a bit of a paedo, but not in a bad way, just boosting you over the climbing wall, making you run round the camp in your pants. It was old-style paedo-ing, before it got such a bad name.
Mark [voiceover]: 'Course, Layton only really had eyes for Duncan Carpenter, the doe-eyed little flirt.

Peep show is one many pieces of pop art culture with strong CSA content I have digested over the years. I guess this was a way of expressing my CSA trauma before I was prepared to actually talk about it.

 

[GeorgeMartin]

Let's not confuse Same Sex Attraction of same age young people, i.e. gay closeted (or not) dynamics with a Pedophile-dynamic. I think sometimes, people (no matter their orientation geographically) confuse 'paedos' with homosexuality, on purpose or ignorance. As a sexual abuse survivor of a home-grown 'paedo' father and his sisters adult son, etc., I find joking about 'paedos' or sexual abuse in general to be offensive. We don't joke about someone with cancer, we don't joke about someone whose schizophrenic, or manic depressive, so why should anyone be joking about molesting children? Just saying (not asking), just making a point.
There were and there are pedophiles, sexual offenders, and even homosexual adult males and young homosexual males (disclosed, suspected or not) within the ranks of the BSA.

Let's please not confuse the homosexual kid having a crush on a fellow scout at camp, with being a 'padeo'.

 

[Alonso]

I'm sorry my post has offended you, that was certainly not my purpose. Since the thread is about a TV show and all the material is fictional I thought there was no need to label it as triggering. I realize I was wrong and I have corrected that.

I think you might have misunderstood the meaning of the dialogue, though. Mark, who is currently an adult, recounts his memories of childhood when he was in the boy scouts. Back then his boy scout leader (probably an adult) was Kinky Layton. We can assume that Kinky is the nickname that the children in the boy scouts group gave him, which is very telling, of course. Duncan Carpenter was another child in the group, just like Mark. Kinky Layton was a "paedo" that abused both Mark and Duncan, and probably other children as well. However, Mark, who is an extremely insecure and needy person, both as a child and as an adult, refuses to acknowledge the abuse and instead just laments that the abuser was more interested in the other child than in him. So there's no SSA between same age people here. It's the story of an adult abusing two children.

As I said, this kind of jokes were my way of expressing my CSA trauma before I was prepared to acknowledge it. In general, jokes and humour are our ways of dealing with our fears without needing to face them directly. And we know that CSA is one of the scariest things that can happen to anybody, so jokes can be very helpful in this sense. I am also a survivor of sexual abuse committed by my own parents (my story has more details). It took me thirty years just to be able to say what they did to me. During those thirty years paedo jokes and other similar jokes were probably the healthiest way I had to express my trauma and my pain (the other ways I had involved hurting myself). It would have been painful if that was taken away from me because somebody felt offended about it.

 

[GeorgeMartin]

Your post didn't offend me. I got exactly where you were coming from Alonso. But I am also looking at your narrative a little differently too. "Kinky Layton" may very well have been a youth scout who was gay, and not at all a supposed sexually deviant predator trying to molest anyone. But there are some who would consider what I just typed to be nonsense, that homosexuals are, in their belief and perception, sexual deviant, and out to molest little boys "to make them gay" (which of course is an absurdity in and of itself if they actually understood that homosexuality is not an addiction but an orientation). And this is not to say on my part, that I haven't met a pedophile who claimed to be a homosexual.

My apologies to you Alonso if I came across as being offended. Assuredly I was not. Sometimes I too joke about my CSA as well as well as my condition (mentally speaking).

Hope all is well.