Imagine being alive and a man in the summer of 1977! Attractive young women were everywhere, strutting about in mini-skirts. Wolf-whistling was a compliment, but better still, you could approach these sexually liberated hotties and hope to get a one-night stand, rather than a place on the register for ‘sexual harassment’. The age of consent was 16 in the UK, but it was effectively 14 if the parents didn’t object, and punishments were – from the perspective of today – extraordinarilly light anyway. The word ‘paedophile’ was largely unknown, and tabloid newspapers such as the Sun were boosting their sales by showing topless ‘page 3 girls’, many of whom, including Samantha Fox and Linda Lusardi, had become stars at barely 16 years of age.
If all this was still too ‘puritan’ and sexually stifling for you, then the new budget airlines meant that places like Sweden or Amsterdam, far more liberal than even 70’s Britain, were only an hour or two away. On the face of it, life was good for a normal horny male in the 70’s in Britain, and it seemed reasonable to suppose it might even get a little better, or at least no worse.
But some people in Britain weren’t content with this. They demanded the right of men to have sex with toddlers. They were real paedophiles. The 1970’s version of today’s MAPs, or Eivind Berge’s ‘sexualists’. And equally as clueless.
Led by the homosexual Tom O’Carroll, his 250 strong organization ‘PIE’ (paedophile information exchange) hoped to hold public meetings to discuss their goals and strategies. This was long before the Internet, of course, so for any type of large-scale ‘discussion’ to take place, it would by necessity have to be in ‘public’, or at least in a real-world venue. Despite this, O’Carroll could have arranged things in a smaller and more anonymous way, rather than booking a large hall and advertising the event to the public, as he appears to have done, seemingly in the hope that new paedophiles would be attracted to attend and join PIE. Looking back at some of the newspaper archives covering his efforts in 1977, it does seem that he was (typically) rather oblivious to the response by the public his agenda would provoke.
O’Carroll probably first realized that allowing sex with four year olds was not on many people’s wish lists a few weeks earlier, when his first attempt to hold a PIE meeting – at London’s Shaftesbury Hotel – led to the entire staff threatening to walk out if it was allowed.
He fared little better at the start of September, when he had hoped to attend an academic conference on ‘love and attraction’ in Wales, but was turned away, with the organizer telling the press that “paedophilia would be better described as child molestation”.
Note that before this, the term ‘paedophilia’ was a word largely unfamiliar to the public, and used mainly in academic contexts and in the treatment of real paedophiles – men sexually attracted to toddlers. Tom O’Carroll brought it into public consciousness, as well as forming the assocation with ‘the age of consent’. O’Carroll and his fellow (largely homosexual) PIE members didn’t seek to lower the age of consent, or return it to the pre-feminist age of 12 or 13, but to more-or-less abolish it entirely. An age of consent of four was the official goal of PIE.
On being ejected from the conference, O’Carroll sought solace in a local pub. Unfortunately, rather than a pint to drown his sorrows, he found one being poured over his head, preceded by the fists of an angry woman.
After being turned away from the Shaftesbury Hotel, and then the Love and Attraction conference, O’Carroll finally found success with his attempt in September to organize a meeting at the Conway Hall in London. That is, ‘success’ in the Eivind Berge type meaning of the word – “no PR is bad PR”. Or mabye – “drawing one’s own blood with every word” measure of success. The Conway Hall was, and is still is owned by the Conway Hall Ethical Society – formed in the 18th century to combat the Christian idea of eternal damnation, and which has since then existed to this day as a meeting place for free and independent thought. The society made clear that it did not associate with the beliefs and goals of PIE, but decided to allow the meeting in the spirit of its mission to defend free speech. O’Carroll, and the small number of paedophiles who turned up to the Conway Hall on Monday September 9th 1977, were soon left ruing that decision. A mob of mainly outraged women were waiting for them, chanting “KILL, KILL, KILL”, and “Let the women get their hands on the perverts”. Words quickly turned into violence, with objects being thrown at the paedophiles that included a smoke bomb. One young paedo was chased nearly 200 meters by local women and given a good beating.
No doubt Tom and the paedophiles expected that women, being the gentler and more compassionate sex, would be supportive of their desires to bang toddlers. Remarkably, they still do today. But what PIE did succeed in doing was to kickstart the backlash to the sexual revolution and the liberalism of the 60’s and 70’s. The glorious summer of male sexuality was coming to an end. Homosexual paedophiles who wanted to sodomize four year old boys, had ensured that a long dark winter was ahead for all of us.