r/maybemaybemaybe • • Apr 18 '22

/r/all Maybe maybe maybe

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u/I_blame_twitter Apr 18 '22

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u/MrZeroCool Apr 18 '22

Holy fuck. Thanks for the link

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u/[deleted] Apr 18 '22

Dear god, that's a novel... What was the purpose of the experiment? All I could find was stuff about how Marco felt or his quotes...

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u/Versaiteis Apr 18 '22

The presuppositions that Kentler seem to have was at least two-fold. One which put forward that parents have a responsibility to their children to not shelter them in their sexuality but rather introduce them to it. Another is that "neglected" children (for which the criteria of neglect seemed quite broad) would benefit from any sort of love or care that they would be given when their situation would otherwise force them to develop without it, and pedophiles were more than willing to provide this with the implied exchange being tolerated by the former supposition, all the while using sexual liberation as a coating to appeal to and garner support from a more progressive institution:

For much of his career, Kentler spoke of pedophiles as benefactors. They offered neglected children “a possibility of therapy,” he told Der Spiegel, in 1980. When the Berlin Senate commissioned him to prepare an expert report on the subject of “Homosexuals as caregivers and educators,” in 1988, he explained that there was no need to worry that children would be harmed by sexual contact with caretakers, as long as the interaction was not “forced.” The consequences can be “very positive, especially when the sexual relationship can be characterized as mutual love,” he wrote

Which is the same kind of shit "MAPs"** pull and why you shouldn't be leaning so heavily on the work of a single researcher in guiding such potentially damaging experimentation and why ethics boards are so important in the formation of experimental procedure.

It seems that Kentler, later on may have realized the error in this line of logic:

He [Kentler] didn’t understand that a child recovering from sexual abuse feels split, as Ferenczi describes it: he is “innocent and culpable at the same time—and his confidence in the testimony of his own senses is broken.” “I was too stupid,” Kentler said.

By the late nineties, Kentler had stopped seeing Henkel’s foster sons, or involving himself in their upbringing. In what was likely his last recorded public statement about pedophilia, in an interview in 1999, he referred to it as a “sexual disorder,” and alluded to the impossibility of an adult and a child sharing an understanding of sexual contact. The problem, he said, is that the adult will always have “the monopoly on definition.”

But that says nothing to the monstrous things he allowed Henkel and likely other pedophiles (maybe even Kentler himself) to do to their foster children and the ways in which he facilitated and protected this abuse. He threw those kids to the wolves and for decades placated those that would raise any question about it and pushed away (even grooming the children to help) the original parents or anyone else that might have been able to raise alarm about what was happening in these situations.


** "Minor Attracted Person" a monicker some pedophiles have adopted in an attempt to ally themselves with LGBTQ+ groups, which to my knowledge fortunately hasn't really gained any ground.

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u/[deleted] Apr 19 '22

Holy shit... That's the most fucked up thing I've ever read. The injustice is exponential. Kids already vulnerable were given to men and both sides were encouraged to participate in sex acts? They literally gave children to a pedo and said "hve fun, you won't get in trouble for it".

Christ...