Communism

Communism... according to most Westerners

Youth rights, including the sexual liberation of children, is compatible with some interpretations of communism/socialism (these terms are used interchangeably by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, but are sometimes distinguished by Leftist individuals and tendencies). Marxism views the nuclear family as a means for the subordination of children and women, exploitation upon which capitalism is supposedly dependent. Family values -- monogamy, homophobia, sexual suppression/repression, and other enemies of free love -- are enforced to maintain the traditional family unit. According to some communists/socialists, extending rights to the young would undermine the father's place of power and interrupt the inheritance of class and acceptance of classist models.

Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)

But perhaps the most important illustration of the link between struggle and sexuality is the Russian Revolution of 1917, in which the working class exploded the limits of capitalism. In the brief period in which the revolution flourished, the revolutionaries abolished all laws against homosexuality, introduced divorce by request, abortion on demand and repealed the age of consent laws.

The 1920s were a period of relative sexual openness for the USSR. Erotic "experimentation" was reportedly common during meetings of the Young Pioneer youth organization. Parents "complained that their 10–12 year old children came home at 3–4 am, declaring that they were at the Pioneer meetings and cut off parental protests with threats and accusations of counter-revolution."

The disempowerment of the working class by Stalinism in the 1930s roughly coincided with the start of a moral panic over "unhealthy relations" between children. It was claimed that "the abnormal sexual relations between children" had "taken on menacing proportions" and required "extreme measures." Sexual indulgence was thought to distract children from more productive activities. The state began to enforce a strict taboo against sexualities that did not conform to the Victorian model. The uniforms of one summer camp were criticized on the grounds that "pants are not entirely hygienic for girls, because they cause in them excessive friction in the sexual organs." Prohibitions on homosexuality were enforced, albeit predominantly "against those instances when juveniles and minors are the objects of homosexual interest," who may have been MAPs.

The problem of youth sexuality was eventually deemed severe enough for the state to segregate male and female schooling. Ann Livschiz writes that this action reflected the "fundamental social conservatism of the majority of the top political leadership of the country and their great fear of youth, and particularly female, sexuality, as a force that could not be overcome, controlled or fully harnessed for the service of the state."

Age-disparate sex: Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong

While exiled in Siberia, Josef Stalin is known to have had an affair with a 13-year-old female named Lidia, at the age of 36. In the biography Young Stalin (2007), Simon Sebag Montefiore wrote:

We know no details of how this developed. But some time in early 1914 Stalin, now thirty-four, embarked on an affair with Lidia, aged thirteen.

We catch a glimpse of Stalin and Lidia together staggering from drinking-bout to drinking-bout because we have her memoirs of their boozy carousals: “In his spare time, Stalin liked to go to evening dances — he could be very jolly too. He loved to sing and dance. He especially liked the song ‘I’m guarding the gold, the gold . . . I’m burying the gold, burying the gold, Guess where, pure damsel with your golden hair’. . . He often joined birthday dinners.” The memoirs of Stalin’s thirteen-year-old mistress were recorded twenty years later [...] while she remained a Siberian housewife. [...]

“He often liked to drop in on some people,” says Lidia, meaning herself. “And he also drank.” Was this how he seduced her — or she him? Girls in places like Kureika matured early — and Lidia does not sound like a shrinking violet. [...]

Even though local lore discouraged affairs with exiles, the local girls were bound to be attracted to these worldly, educated revolutionaries in their midst. This statutory rape was not rape by force but an old-fashioned seduction.

Monifore notes the age of consent among other important contextual factors:

Fourteen was technically the age of consent in the Russian and European regions of the Tsarist Empire, but this was Siberia. Besides, there was no precise legal concept of statutory rape in Tsarist law: for the police, it was as much a crime “against female honour” as a violation of her father’s chattels. The seducer’s agreement to marry and then the exchange of marriage vows were seen as rectifying an untoward situation.

The Chinese revolutionary and statesmen Mao Zedong wrote romantic poetry in youth and lived an active sex life which included many young female sexual partners. There are only 2 claims of sexual activity involving minors under 18, the first coming from Jonathan Mirsky, who in 1997 claimed to have interviewed a 57-years-old woman ("Mrs. Chen") in Hong Kong, who said she began having sex with Mao in 1962 when she was 14 and he 69/70. Chen appears to view the experience positively, with Mirsky noting that "She had plenty to say about the Great Helmsman’s virility and stamina", and how Mao cried after she was sent to work in the North of the country against his wishes:

After five years, Jiang Qing insisted that Ms Chen be banished to the north-east, to a lesser job. Mao, she claimed, took her on his knee and wept, but said he could do nothing. After some years in exile, she was summoned back to Beijing for a brief stopover where Mao, again weeping, said he could do nothing for her and was sending her back to Nanking where her marriage had been arranged. (Ibid).

It should be noted that Mirsky may be an unreliable source. His language is moralistic and derogatory ("monster"), and he consistently relies on and has even reviewed the source for second claim, Dr. Li Zhisui's The Private Life of Chairman Mao: The Memoirs of Mao’s Personal Physician (1994)., who claimed that Mao loved to reminisce about an encounter he had as a teenage villager with a "pretty" 12-year-old girl. While this claim concerns attraction instead of action, Dr. Li's book is the major source for claims of Mao's sexual prowess - including events which are framed negatively such as Mao's alleged contracting and spreading venereal disease through sex. Dr. Li's claims have been critiqued by professional Chinese historian Mobo Gao in a dedicated chapter titled How a medical doctor doctors history: a case study of Li Zhisui, in his 2008 book The Battle for China's Past. There are many other professional critiques of commonly accepted anti-Stalin and anti-Mao claims.

Anti-capitalist supporters

• An immediate demand of the Communist Party of Great Britain was until the early 2020s: "The abolition of age-of-consent laws. We recognise the right of individuals to enter into the sexual relations they choose provided this does not conflict with the rights of others. Alternative legislation to protect children from sexual abuse." They have since removed this demand and do not have a set-in-stone policy on the Age of Consent.

• The Spartacist League: "Marxists oppose all laws against “crimes without victims,” such as prostitution, drug use or pornography. We utterly reject the practice whereby looking at pornography is equated with violent crimes such as rape, sexual assault and even murder. We also oppose the criminalization of those who look at child pornography which, like all pornography, is simply words and images designed for pleasure. [...] In line with this, we do not think intergenerational sex is by definition abusive, nor do we think incest is a priori a crime to be punished by the bourgeois state. [...] We oppose age of consent laws because we oppose state intervention into people’s private sexual activities. We do not accord the capitalist state the right to decree the age at which youth may engage in consensual sexual activity. To create genuinely free and equal relations between people in all spheres, including sex, requires nothing less than the destruction of this class system and the creation of a communist world. In a classless society, social and economic constraints over sexual relations will be non-existent, and in the words of Friedrich Engels, 'there is no other motive left except mutual inclination.'"

• The US Revolutionary Socialist League (disbanded): "We believe that all consensual sex is the business only of those involved. The state has no business regulating in any way expressions of sexuality between consenting persons of any number, sex, or age. The state's attempt to regulate youth sexuality in particular is rooted in young people's position as property of their parents and/or wards of the state. Young people are jailed in schools, economically exploited, and denied the most basic political rights. Society maintains this oppression by imposing the idea that young people are not capable of determing their own wants and needs, in particular their sexual needs and desires. We oppose age of consent laws. These laws deny the ability of young people to determine their own sexual needs and desires. They maintain the status of youth as property, and reinforce the closet for gay youth."

• Sandra Bloodworth: "Ultimately children will not gain genuine liberation until capitalism has been destroyed root and branch and a new society is built in which all human sexuality is encouraged and nurtured instead of despised and repressed."

• David Thorstad, founder of NAMBLA.

• Shulamith Firestone, Marxist feminist.

• Roger Moody and various others associated with the early gay and MAP Movements.