What kind of academic sits in the audience and listens to a guy like this?

Robert Stacy McCain has the disturbing story.

Pro-Pedophile Author: ‘How Dare You Call Me a Pro-Pedophile Author?!’

James Kincaid is a University of Southern California professor emeritus who is the author of Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (1992) and Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting (1998). When it was announced he would speak  in Toronto at an academic conference with the creepy title “Bodies at Play: Sexuality, Childhood and Classroom Life,” an understandable outrage erupted:

Dr. Charles McVety of the Institute for Canadian Values has written an open letter to Chris Alexander, the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Canada, asking that Kincaid be denied entry into the country. . . .
“On behalf of the 125,000 members of the Institute for Canadian Values and Canada Family Action, we request that the Minister refuse admission of Dr. James Kincaid to Canada for a lecture on October 19th, 2013 in Toronto,” Dr. McVety wrote.
“Dr. Kincaid is a well-known advocate for pedophilia, a criminal activity in Canada,” the letter states.

Is that description — “a well-known advocate for pedophilia” –  perhaps just a wee bit over-the-top? Does it fail to capture the complexity and sophistication of Kincaid’s nuanced arguments? Let’s read the publisher’s description of one of Kincaid’s books:

In Erotic Innocence James R. Kincaid explores contemporary America’s preoccupation with stories about the sexual abuse of children. Claiming that our culture has yet to come to terms with the bungled legacy of Victorian sexuality, Kincaid examines how children and images of youth are idealized, fetishized, and eroticized in everyday culture. Evoking the cyclic elements of Gothic narrative, he thoughtfully and convincingly concludes that the only way to break this cycle is to acknowledge—and confront—not only the sensuality of children but the eroticism loaded onto them.