Aimee Sword
Language is the tool of choice for the Social Engineer. Professors tell university students that there is no such thing as ‘right or wrong’, we are all autonomous and can pick our beliefs to suit ourselves. The media pick up the mantle and subtly change the meaning of common words in a game of Chinese whispers, until they arrive at a word or phrase forever appended to particular events, which clouds our view in a moral fog.
40 or 50 years ago, a woman who gave birth bereft of a husband, was known as an unmarried mother. A figure of some disgrace. Her child was labelled a bastard.
The moral clarity of the time demanded that the child/victim be handed to a ‘decent’ married to couple to raise, to at least have the appearance of not being a ‘bastard’. The pain of parting felt by the Mother was seen as due penalty for having transgressed the moral code.
Today we speak of ‘single mothers’, a heroic band of courageous women to be supported by society. Those who are unequal to the task, for whatever reason, despite these days being supported by housing benefit and social security, are described as having ‘given up’ their children.
Nothing has changed genetically in the female race that I am aware of, and yet we no longer recognise the pain of parting with a child, even as penalty – ‘given up’, the phrase beloved of the media, implies something lightly shrugged off as surplus to requirements. You ‘give up’ your magazine subscription, or drinking pals when you marry. Perhaps only the alcoholic is today recognised as giving up something he craves, continues to pine for, wants, but has given up for external reasons beyond his control.
The point I want to make here is that all the social engineers have achieved with their manipulation of the language is not a fundamental change in the thoughts or feelings of the people directly involved, but a change in how they are perceived by others. In this they are supported by the media and the legislators. Hence our ‘hate laws’, designed to bring down the forces of law and penalise those who externalise the thoughts and feelings they always did and always will, harbour.
Sex is another subject which has undergone a tectonic change in language. Again we are exhorted to express ourselves sexually in whatever way we wish. Any loving partnership should be valued. We have laws designed to control those who wish to impose an ‘old fashioned’ morality on us. Sexual relationships are the natural conclusion of the very human feelings of love and attraction that we feel towards each other and we must give that expression full rein.
I was pondering all this when I came across the sad saga of Aimee Sword. Aimee is 36 years old, so brought up within a time frame that encompasses both the current ‘let it all hang out’ attitude to sex as an expression of love, and equally that of no recognition of a natural mother having any feelings towards the child that she so lightly ‘shrugged off’.
Aimee is married with five children of the marriage; her husband was unaware of her infidelities. When 16 years ago, she found herself pregnant, she somehow managed to conceal the pregnancy from her husband and arranged for the child to be adopted. Nothing in the modern rhetoric addressed the hormone driven feelings she felt for her baby. She, presumably, was supposed to encompass this event in the same manner as an abortion. Just one of those things. Nurture is more powerful than nature we are told.
Meanwhile her child grew up in another family and became quite a handful. He had become a forceful and physically mature character, and was getting into trouble. The adoptive parents encouraged him to make contact with his ‘real’ Mother. He did so.
Having made contact with my natural brothers in my 30s, I can testify to the extraordinary experience it is to open the door to someone who looks like you, sounds like you, that society says you should have a loving bond with – for he/she is closely related to you, but that you know absolutely nothing about.
We learn the boundaries of physical contact gradually over many years. Not so for anyone who finds themselves in this extraordinary situation. You need to figure it out unaided in the first few seconds. Do you throw your arms round each others neck like long parted friends? You are not long parted friends. Do you air kiss like actors who abhor each other but must maintain the pretence of love and friendship? You are not enemies seeking to maintain an appearance. Do you hug as you would the husband of a close friend you see frequently – in which case, is it a full on pelvic hug in that ‘would if we could, but we can’t’ manner, or the stiff formality of the handshake? There is no book of words to consult, nor time to consult it – yet you must get it right.
Had my brother turned out to be of that Rubgy player build and ability to make me laugh type that I have always had a fatal attraction for, I might have got it wrong. I undeniably felt great love for him; as an older sister, I felt a great – and undeniably hormonal – need to look after him, to feed him, to make sure he slept well, to play ‘little mother’ to him, but fortunately for me, there was less danger of me being physically attracted to a long thin streak of, *ahem* with a bald patch and a penchant for chewing over the finer details of ecclesiastical law at exorbitant length than being overcome with passion for Princess Anne.
Aimee was not so fortunate. She opened the door to a fully grown version of the man who had got her pregnant. Not only that, but given the nature of sexual relations, which requires that the male be a willing partner, a forceful young man who we may reasonably surmise, was not sexually inexperienced.
Aha, we are ignoring something here. He was, of course, her biological son. At this point both parties should have had deafening alarm bells ringing, mostly in Aimee’s head, since she was the adult here. ‘Ignore everything you have been taught about the free expression of love being sex’ they should have said to Aimee, ‘ignore the media rhetoric that says you have no maternal hormonal feelings towards this boy, ignore the law that says he is not your son – he is your son, and these feelings must be expressed in a way that you have never been taught’.
We must, of course, not expect Aime’s son to have taken any notice of the alarm bells in his head, he was after all a ‘child’ at the time. A child who had never learnt how to express the wave of emotion he felt towards this woman. He had never learnt the boundaries of physical contact with her. No doubt he was fully versed in how to behave towards his adoptive mother, but not towards another woman for whom he had strong hormonally driven feelings.
Aimee and her son didn’t get the hugging and the kissing ‘right’. The wave of emotion they felt concluded in a sexual encounter.
Aimee has just been sent to jail for 30 years for four counts of first degree criminal sexual conduct. The headlines scream ‘Mother hunts down ten year old son to rape him’. Albeit that particular headline got his age wrong.
The Face book groups for and against have drawn up their battle lines. Those supporting Aimee contend that the ‘unmanageable youth’ coerced her into having sex with him. Those supporting the child, now 16, contend that he has suffered permanent emotional damage by losing his virginity whilst a ‘little boy’ to an act of perverse incestuous rape’.
There appears to be no middle ground – that here were two young people who had been brought up in an age where they were not supposed to be host to the emotions that they felt.
He, because he had been given ‘another Mother’ to love, honour and obey, and the narrative does not allow for the feelings he experienced on meeting this woman that his hormones drove him to ‘love’ with no education as to how to express that love.
She, because the narrative does not allow for the years of pining and wanting to hold her child, nor how to behave towards him when he appears as a fully grown adult.
I pity both of them. They are the product of social engineering which dictates the narrative of how we, the voyeuristic public see them, but has never addressed the genetic and hormonal attraction to each other that they were bound to feel, that nature intended them to feel, but which they should have had years in which to gradually set the sexual boundaries for.
The media, of course, sees this case in very clear cut lines, driven on by the ‘rent-a-quote’ psychologists – Aimee is the American version of Joseph Fritzl, and must be condemned at every opportunity. If only life was really that straightforward.
30 years in a brutal American jail is going to address the problem quite how?
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July 15, 2010 at 16:59 -
I had not heard the story, and had no idea in which country it was set until I got to the bit about the 30-year sentence. Then I knew immediately that it was the USA.
There are sexual acts that should be criminal because of the involvement of minors, others unable to give informed consent, or violence or threats. But I find it hard to see any reason why the criminal law should take an interest in incest as such, or should regard incest as an aggravating circumstance.
Incest without contraception may be a matter for concern, because of the risk of genetic defects in offspring. We would, however, need to look at the probabilities before reaching any decision on whether the criminal law should be concerned, and there is also the complication that if you ask someone who has been born with genetic defects whether they would prefer not to have existed, they are likely to say that they prefer to exist.
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July 15, 2010 at 17:09
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July 15, 2010 at 20:44 -
Or HAVE to smoke, Anna. Let’s be honest, it’ s an addiction. And I know what I’m talking about.
As for Aimee Sword. This was new to me, so I looked up some articles. It’s almost as if it didn’t really happen, as they’re all so different. Is it 9 years of prison or 30? Was he 10 or 16? Did she look for him on internet? Or was he looking for her via a social counselor? Questions, questions.
Whatever, even the 9 years would be ridiculous.
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July 15, 2010 at 22:44 -
A very good piece. We are mammals, after all, not insects.
Thirty years in prison, if that’s the case, would be an inhumanity far worse than the original offence. I can only imagine that such a sentence is “pour décourager les autres”. But that suggests a fear that we’d all be at it like rabbits in the absence of a serious disincentive. There might be some truth in that, however.
I think that some people do protest too much.
How exactly did our species survive the long stress of the pleistocene? Cunning, yes; cooperation, yes; aggression, probably; but also cannibalism, all-year-round female fertility and yes, incest, I would expect. In a perilous world of short lives, violent death, disease, death in childbirth, starvation and so on, who would decline to mate on account of such a technicality? A few thousand years of relative ease does not suddenly erase that heritage, embarrassing though it may now be to us.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could rediscover public thoughtfulness, compassion even?
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July 15, 2010 at 23:52 -
“30 years in a brutal American jail is going to address the problem quite how?”
Of course it’s not actually going to do any good for anyone involved….except the good ole boys in the south and journo-morons in some of the bonkers press will high five each other, praise the lord and tell us all what a good job they’ve done making the world safe for…erm…well…..aaaah?
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July 16, 2010 at 01:00 -
So a lesser sentence wuld make you happier.
And in no time a ‘ look at me ‘ social worker / psychologist will ‘prove’ that such deeds are really normal.
It seens that brisk disapproval is becoming taboo.
Still UK society is a small bit of world society and quite possible due for some forcible external correction. -
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July 16, 2010 at 11:34 -
Her five other children will be deprived of their mother for many years by this cruel long sentence. Despite what she did, this knock-on effect would appear to be grounds for clemency. I hope she has a good lawyer fighting for appeal.
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