So the whole Boing Boing vs. Secure Computing saga (my radio piece is here and NYT coverage is here) has gotten just a touch weirder.
From the NYT piece:
In an e-mail message to Xeni Jardin, another of Boing Boing’s chiefs, Tomo Foote-Lennox, a director of filtering data for Secure Computing, asked why the bloggers were starting a war. “We discussed several ways that you could organize your site so that I could protect the kids and you could distribute all the information you wanted,” Mr. Foote-Lennox wrote.
A couple of bloggers, Joi Ito, (who found the link from Sean Bonner) and Kathryn Cramer, and sex blogger Violet Blue have found that Mr. Foote-Lennox isn’t quite the “protector of kids” that he’d like to make himself out to be.
All those bloggers (and probably others) have found that Mr. Foote-Lennox turns up on Google’s Usenet Archives (aka “Google Groups”) under the alt.sex.diapers group, (for adult baby fetishists) in entries from 1996. He posts here inviting people to a party, and again here writing about that party.
Violet said it best:
I’ve lectured on panels with AB practitioners and pro-doms who specialize in AB play. This, however, is a particularly disturbing context for an AB fetishist. This is exactly the problem we’re facing; people like Lennox are likey *dangerously* confusing fantasy with reality. The important thing to remember, though is that AB and diaper fetishists are typically not sexualizing babies, though it is a very, VERY extreme type of fetish play that you need to really be articulate about. In my strong opinion, it is not a fetish that someone who works for, or with, children should be doing; how can anyone ever know where fantasy and reality merge in their minds?
Look, I don’t think it’s anyone’s business what someone does to get off in their private lives. But it’s a HUGE red flag when the person aggressively “protecting children” is into AB play; I’d way rather have a medical fetishist or a human pony — something neutral. Or at least a dominatrix, who spends her professional time negotiating the differences between fantasy and reality (often explaining these distinctions to AB’s). Now no one can ever know if Lennox knows what it means to be a responsible adult (especially one who can keep a fetish on a low profile). Either way, AB’s have a very different way of seeing children and childhood than the rest of us. The key thing with most ABers is that they typically don’t sexualize children — the want to *be* children in the worst way, and it’s usually the mommy figure that’s sexualized.
