abuse is an abstract object you have to be a platonist to believe in

Persecution for fake sexual abuse breaks my heart. My conscience tells me I have to do something about it. This is why I have dedicated my life to activism on sexuality’s side. One way I go about it is to clarify my thinking and put it more forcefully so that maybe more people can wake up to what is going on. I am writing this post to express my realization that I am fighting a cultural belief in an abstract object. As a more usual example, numbers are abstract objects that may or may not exist (personally I think not), but in any case they don’t do anything. It’s more like a coincidence that mathematics tells us true facts about numbers, if numbers happen to exist.

If you think hard about the nature of abstract objects they become very elusive and harder to pin down the more you think. Unlike the objects studied by mathematics, “child sexual abuse” was never based on any logical theory to begin with either. All we have is a script springing out of a moral panic which emerged in the 1980s repeating over and over again in the courtrooms. It is abuse because the law says it is abuse and there is no room to question it -- until now. This is a different cultural moment. I hope this momentum can carry it from here and then perhaps my work is done.