I'm withholding judgment, too. I think if he really was doing this a lot, on a regular basis, he would be smart enough to have someone else obtain it for him. The fact that he "outed" himself about going to the site to me seems to support his story.
As for whether it's a strange excuse or not -- well, how many people who are abused as children end up in the sex trade? How many exorcise their demons by getting into S&M? Maybe going to this site is a way for Townshend to exorcise his demons. Andrea Dworkin wrote a piece once about Nazi imagery in porn she found in Israel and how disturbing she found it. Susie Bright responded to that by noting (I'm paraphrasing, because I can't locate the exact quote -- lo siento) that she didn't find that unusual: we eroticize the taboo and the dangerous, and in Israel, what's more taboo than the Holocaust? If Townshend was abused (and I wouldn't discount the possibility), then it does make a weird sort of sense that he would want to confront it in that way. If he had tons of child porn on his computers, that would be one thing. But until all the evidence is in, I say don't give in to the group lynching mentality. Not that you were.
On a different topic: I shared your "I don't like that baby" anecdote with my best pal Kat, whose daughter is two months old. She laughed a whole lot. "Uh, it's a BABY! How can you form any reasonable perspective on a person at that stage of life, let alone pronounce judgment to someone else?" Exactly.
no subject
As for whether it's a strange excuse or not -- well, how many people who are abused as children end up in the sex trade? How many exorcise their demons by getting into S&M? Maybe going to this site is a way for Townshend to exorcise his demons. Andrea Dworkin wrote a piece once about Nazi imagery in porn she found in Israel and how disturbing she found it. Susie Bright responded to that by noting (I'm paraphrasing, because I can't locate the exact quote -- lo siento) that she didn't find that unusual: we eroticize the taboo and the dangerous, and in Israel, what's more taboo than the Holocaust? If Townshend was abused (and I wouldn't discount the possibility), then it does make a weird sort of sense that he would want to confront it in that way. If he had tons of child porn on his computers, that would be one thing. But until all the evidence is in, I say don't give in to the group lynching mentality. Not that you were.
On a different topic: I shared your "I don't like that baby" anecdote with my best pal Kat, whose daughter is two months old. She laughed a whole lot. "Uh, it's a BABY! How can you form any reasonable perspective on a person at that stage of life, let alone pronounce judgment to someone else?" Exactly.