Is Barbara Gowdy Nuts?

So I'm sitting in the waiting room of a doctor's office in Whitby and I pick up a recent copy of Maclean's magazine. I start to read an interview with Barbara Gowdy, a Canadian author of highly acclaimed books such as "The White Bone." The interview was conducted by Kenneth Whyte on the occasion of Gowdy's latest book, "Helpless." Here's a review by the L.A. Times of "Helpless."

I was completely beside myself, shocked and wondering where the hell this interview would end up. The subject of the interview is pedophilia and the apparently bad rap that pederasts are getting from society. This definately goes into the 'what the fuck' bin. You can read the entire interview here.

Here's a small excerpt of the interview:

Whyte: Are you suggesting that having sexual feelings for little girls is normal?

Gowdy: I'm suggesting it's probably more widespread than we know, and there's a lot of men who control themselves and have decided that, "I can't help what I feel but I can help how I behave."

...

Whyte: There's no doubt kids are more overtly sexualized today, but on the other hand there is a lot more social concern about men acting on sexual interest in young girls today than ever before. We're firmly against it, there's almost a hysteria about it.


Gowdy: Yes, we believe it's almost the worst feeling you can have, as a man -- sexual interest in a child, girl or boy. It didn't used to be the case. I mean, when I was a girl in the '50s there were what we called funny men or gropers -- the milkman was one, there was a guy down the street who in exchange for a candy would grope you. And we took advantage of that because we wanted the candy. And we knew these men were creepy, icky, and lost in a way, but we weren't frightened by them.

Whyte: But surely they weren't accepted as upstanding citizens?


Gowdy: No, we were just told not to go near them. And I've talked to women in their 70s and 80s about what happened to them when they were young -- creepy uncles or the farmer next door, and they all seemed to have had an experience, and their mothers all said the same thing, "Just stay away from him if you don't like it. Don't go near him, he's strange." And I think there's a tricky argument here for the fact that men being allowed to get away with groping little girls has allowed little girls to live. Nowadays, the minute a man touches a little girl he'd better kill her because his life is over.