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| Chapter 1.
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Chapter 1. Perverted Predators and their Venomous Victimologists
Or, How to Manufacture Monsters
In late 2007, a joke began circulating on the internet, as people started sending it to work colleagues, friends and family. It went like this:
“School 1977 vs. School 2007
Scenario: Johnny and Mark get into a fistfight after school.
1977 - Crowd gathers. Mark wins. Johnny and Mark shake hands and end up mates.
2007 - Police are called, Armed Response Unit arrives and arrests Johnny and Mark. Mobiles with video of fight confiscated as evidence. They are charged with assault, ASBOs are taken out and both are suspended even though Johnny started it. Diversionary conferences and parent meetings conducted. Video shown on 6 internet sites.
Scenario: Jeffrey won't sit still in class, disrupts other students.
1977 - Jeffrey is sent to the principal's office and given 6 of the best. Returns to class, sits still and does not disrupt class again.
2007 - Jeffrey is given huge doses of Ritalin. Counselled to death. Becomes a zombie. Tested for ADD. School gets extra funding because Jeffrey has a disability. Drops out of school.
Scenario: Billy breaks a window in his neighbour's car and his Dad gives him the slipper.
1977 - Billy is more careful next time, grows up normal, goes to college, and becomes a successful businessman.
2007 - Billy's dad is arrested for child abuse. Billy is removed to foster care and joins a gang. Psychologist tells Billy's sister that she remembers being abused herself and their dad goes to prison. Billy's mum has an affair with the psychologist. Psychologist gets a promotion.
Scenario: Mark, a college student, brings cigarettes to school.
1977 - Mark shares a smoke with the school principal out on the smoking area.
2007 - Police are called and Mark is expelled from School for drug possession. His car is searched for drugs and weapons.
Scenario: Mohammed fails high school English.
1977 - Mohammed retakes his exam, passes and goes to college.
2007 - Mohammed's cause is taken up by local human rights group. Newspaper articles appear nationally explaining that making English a requirement for graduation is racist. Civil Liberties Association files class action lawsuit against state school system and his English teacher. English is banned from core curriculum. Mohammed is given his qualification anyway but ends up mowing lawns for a living because he cannot speak English.
Scenario: Johnny takes apart leftover firecrackers, puts them in a model plane paint bottle and blows up an anthill.
1977 - Ants die.
2007 - MI5 and police are called and Johnny is charged with perpertrating acts of terrorism. Teams investigate parents, siblings are removed from the home, computers are confiscated, and Johnny's dad goes on a terror watch list and is never allowed to fly again.
Scenario: Johnny falls during break and scrapes his knee. His teacher, Mary, finds him crying, and gives him a hug to comfort him.
1977 - Johnny soon feels better and goes back to playing.
2007 - Mary is accused of being a sexual predator and loses her job. She faces three years in prison. Johnny undergoes five years of therapy. Becomes gay.”
Whilst this hardly constitutes a rigorous sociological analysis of the last three decades – it is designed simply to induce amusement (or irritation, depending on whether your affiliations are to political correctness or free thinking) - it does address a distinct cultural shift which few who have lived through that period could seriously deny.
Punitive Progressiveness
The mutation depicted between these two scenes is, I believe, a manifestation - although perhaps ‘symptom’ is a better word - of a cultural revolution which has been taking place in our times. As I mentioned previously, I have personally been profoundly affected – in a violently traumatic way – by this social transformation, which cost me my professional career, my livelihood, my home, my liberty and my mental health, transporting me deep into a nuclear winter of long-term, suicidal depression. Overnight, I was transformed from a productive, hard-working professional into a shattered ghost of a human being, who simply wanted to die. This was not merely an individual trauma; it caused incalculable shock and torment for my loved ones. It deeply perturbs me to discover that I was merely one of thousands in the UK alone who became overnight casualties of a ferocious and supremely powerful moral crusade: the project of Child Protection.
Cultural transitions of this magnitude – and I think militant child protectionism is an especially virulent symptom of this historic transformation - are often characterised as stories of social progress. It may seem crazily counter-intuitive to seek to question this particular progress story. How could anyone sanely argue that child protection is not an unqualified human good? But perhaps it is precisely because ‘everyone’ agrees that something is beyond debate, above sober, intelligent, critique, that it requires our most urgent scrutiny. ‘Everyone’ in Germany once believed that Jews were destroying the economic, moral and social fabric of ‘the Fatherland’ in the first half of the twentieth century. Most heinously of all, everyone believed, the Jews were polluting the purity of the Aryan master race by encouraging interbreeding between innocent Aryan girls and sub-human types. It is almost certainly true that many ordinary Germans remained silent and refused to count themselves in as members of this paranoid and genocidal ‘everyone’; but their silence, whether borne of fear or, less forgivably, indifference, contributed to a monumental experiment in mass annihilation. More than six million men, women and children were exterminated on the altar of this belief system, simply because they carried the signifier ‘Jew’.
Similarly, in the Deep South of the USA, during a similar historical period, an analogous ‘everyone’ believed that black men were sexually rapacious ravagers of innocent white women; ‘... I am a racist idiot!
So far as I can discern from their public (published and spoken) statements, the architects of our current age of Child Protectionism, our Western Cultural Revolution, have never betrayed the slightest hint of doubt that their efforts are borne of anything other than pure righteousness. This, they may be somewhat perturbed to learn, they share with supremacists and fascists. Hitler and his sycophants were animated by identical certitudes; doubt is relegated by hardcore fascists, new cultural purifiers, who prefer to call themselves ‘progressives’, and psychotics alike to the status of contemptible soft-headedness or dangerous slipperiness (rather than, for example, a most precious and necessary check on human arrogance and delusion). The new revolutionaries of Child Salvation see themselves, uncannily, as engaged in a uniquely imperative struggle, a necessarily militant campaign, to flush out hidden child abusers wherever they may be and purge the world of their malignant presence.
“Full Stop!” brays the British NSPCC, in its campaign against ‘child abuse’. The implication is that, behind every ordinary-looking front door, behind every professional appearance (youth worker, football coach, teacher), behind all ordinary appearances (including – possibly especially - that of parent), a countless horde of child molesters and predatory sadists of every persuasion lurk in the anonymity of privacy. These monsters must be stopped. If wholly innocent people get wrongfully accused (and personally ruined) along the way, or, as the campaign grows in zeal and confidence, if the definition of child abuse becomes so absurdly elastic as to create pervasive paranoia and adult fearfulness not only for children but of children, so be it. These are small prices to pay, the crusaders appear to be saying, for the eradication of evil in our midst.
It may be, however, that the time is long overdue for us to subject such fervent claims to some degree of scepticism and rigorously critical analysis. Against the claims of this particular version of progressiveness, which effectively amounts to the quest to cherish children with a viciousness and ruthlessness no concept of compassion could ever contain (even though its spokespersons often lard their pronouncements with piety and lachrymose sentimentality), I endeavour to argue that the material result of this social purification campaign is not only an insidious and contagious misanthropy, but a licence to the virtuous to give glorious and exhilarating vent to the sadism, cruelty and vindictiveness they would otherwise have to struggle with. There is violence in their virtuousness, sadism in their sympathy and, most notably, perversity in their purity, which, I believe, they would prefer not to acknowledge. Militant child salvationists seem to have forgotten, or are simply unaware of the fact, that fascists have always deployed the imagery of threatened purity (or innocence) to justify ‘social cleansing’ operations.
Our new moral guardians believe that aggression and lust are unpleasant defects which belong to bad types of people, who must be compelled to undergo corrective treatment. Such treatment, of course, is devised and conducted by non-aggressive, good types of people who never, ever, have unbidden or ‘inappropriate’ erotic feelings, such as social workers, probation officers and policemen, not to mention prosecution lawyers and judges.
At the risk of sounding slightly arrogant, it is perhaps worth noting that the first three protectors of public decency mentioned above generally share a relatively low level of educational and intellectual attainment in comparison with other professions. Police officers who needed my help to spell my name and my professional title had little difficulty in designating me a modern day witch; as one of them put it, my internet activity showed that I was something he called an ‘ephebofoal’. A little later in his monologue, this became ‘ephebofowl.’ I think he was trying to show a pointy-headed intellectual like me that he knew his onions. He seemed curiously oblivious to the fact that he was using terms that referred to young horses and chickens attracted to adolescents. I think he was trying to find the word ‘ephebephile’, but I was too polite to correct him.
It is little wonder that these guardians of decency conspicuously ignore (repress, perhaps?) the brilliant, but discomforting, insights of a profoundly influential Viennese intellectual who died just before the half-way mark of the last century. I am referring to Sigmund Freud, who saw that aggression and lust were ineradicable aspects of the human condition. All who are born mortal, Freud argued, must struggle with these forces. Anyone making claims on Freud’s couch to be motivated solely by compassion and altruism would be met with a kindly but robust scepticism. Freud would be listening, quietly and patiently, for the symptomatic appearance of sadistic enjoyment in the patient’s speech; and he would not have long to wait if he happened to be listening to one of our present day Child Saviours. Should they begin to talk to a psychoanalyst (as opposed to a journalist) about the ‘punishment, management and treatment of offenders’, they may be deeply embarrassed to discover that the primitive malice simmering behind their carefully crafted sermons would be forensically exposed.
From fascism to Fascism in eight easy steps
In the Introduction, I abjured the tendency to overuse this word; it can so easily become not only meaningless but offensive to all those who have lost their lives in anti-fascist struggle, or who simply had the misfortune of becoming the fascists’ designated scapegoat. However, there is a rather precise sense, intimated by Foucault in the opening epithet of this book, in which the term is not only pertinent but necessary as a means of understanding certain forms of socially mandated hatred. I referred earlier to an essay by the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas; he gives us some exceptionally important descriptions, which we might do well to heed as warnings, about how what he calls ‘the Fascist state of mind’ can arise .(1) Beginning with a craving for purity and a hatred of complexity and contradiction, which are viewed as pollution or disease, it only seizes power at the culmination of a series of subsequent steps (Bollas identifies eight).
I think it is worth looking at his descriptions quite carefully. Even though I doubt very much that he had this in mind when he wrote his evocative essay, I think he provides us with a brilliant and incisive analysis of the ruthlessness and fervour suffusing witch hunts such as Operation Ore and its proliferating offspring. He suggests that 'intellectual genocide', a repertoire of mental processes which create the fascist mind, is a precursor to actual genocide. Bollas holds that any hope of preventing true genocide lies in intervening at the stage of intellectual genocide. He is frighteningly and precisely right.
The steps Bollas outlines are not necessarily malignant individually, although when they operate together they are truly Fascist. He distinguishes between 'committive' genocide, the deeds actually enacted, and 'omittive' genocide (e.g., all those ordinary Germans who despised anti-Semitism, but not sufficiently to act against it). In the 'committive' segment we have:
Distortion - an early step, involving a subtle distortion of an opponent's viewpoint, rendering it less intelligent or credible than hitherto. This can be and often is an ordinary part of debate, but when taken to an extreme it becomes slander. For example, when psychological researchers whose work suggests that familial cruelty and neglect are far more important predictors of subsequent psychopathology than mutually pleasurable ‘underage’ sexual encounters are represented as apologists for child abuse, a slanderous degree of misrepresentation has occurred.
Decontextualisation - removing one comment from its textual environment and holding it up as a baldly true statement of the writer's beliefs (everyone can be made to look mad or perverted using this tactic). As Bollas writes: "The extreme of this act is the removal of the victim from his tribe, home (i.e., context), isolated for purposes of persecution". All ruined by Operation Ore will know about this manoeuvre very deeply.
Denigration - again, Bollas' own words describe this most clearly: "The belittling of an opponent's view combines distortion and decontextualisation, rendering the opponent's views ridiculous. This is a door through which affects (of scorn and belittlement) move and displace ideation as the machinery of conflict with the opposition." Intelligent thought gives way to unrestrained emoting.
Caricature - the move from twisting the decontextualised statement to make it sound absurd and/or wicked to cartooning the individual who made it:
“Again, it is part of ordinary rhetoric to caricature the opposition’s view and yet it is a transfer from the view held to the holder of the view. It therefore represents a significant step in the identification of a person or group with ascribed undesirable qualities.”
I would add that the act of converting behaviours into a species of humanity, reifying essentially highly ambiguous acts, such as viewing erotica on the internet, which may not even be fully comprehensible to the actor himself, into a type of person, can be seen as belonging to this category.
Character assassination - attempting to eliminate the opposition by discrediting the personal character of the holder of the view. This might happen in everyday ‘gossip’ but it cannot legitimately be part of any scientific, or truthful, endeavour. In particular, wherever the victim of character assassination cannot speak for him - or herself - for example, in a place where fictions or decontextualised 'facts' (which amounts to the same thing) are being circulated without any form of adequate contestation (like our contemporary law courts) - a human being can easily become eliminated from the scene of consideration ("send him to gaol - he's just a vile pervert!").
Change of name - e.g., "kikes" for Jews, "gooks" for Vietnamese, "paedos" for anyone who gets caught appreciating the erotic beauty of the young. Bollas suggests that this is an act of eliminating the proper name, the essential precursor to eliminating the person himself. I think this is a critical, even pivotal, point on the fulcrum which, if passed, leads almost inevitably to Fascism proper.
Categorisation as aggregation - The moment when an individual is transferred to a mass in which he loses his identity - e.g. 'paedo' or 'sex offender'. Here concentration camps and gas chambers start to become possible.
In the 'Omittive' segment of intellectual genocide we have
Absence of reference - Bollas: "This is an act of omission, when the life, work, or culture of an individual or group is intentionally not referred to. ... a writer such as Solzhenitsyn may be removed from the bookshelves, or in the extreme there are no references to crimes against humanity."
Bollas believes that these stages of intellectual genocide, before the first person has actually been lynched or incarcerated, should be seen as crimes against humanity. I think he makes a fair point. I also think that all of his categories, committive and omittive, are firmly in place, and at their most extreme, in the field of the regulation/policing of sexuality. Sexual Fascism is here, now, in our midst, not merely a dreadful prospect to be prevented. I anticipate all of these tactics being used on any form of dissident perspective. However, I also, perhaps foolishly, believe that a more truthful and nuanced account has to be at least offered.
Fantasy = Intention = Crime: Psychology for the sexually hysterical
The obsessionality, terror and fanaticism that has come to govern the project of ‘Child Protection’ has, I hope to persuade you, become a most dangerous social scourge, one that is itself exceedingly harmful (and intrusive) to those it was ostensibly created to shield – children. In our sexually enlightened times, children may also find themselves separated from their loved ones and placed on the infamous Sex Offenders Register – as ‘children who sexually harm other children’. This is a purely invented fiction; children have always been prone to experiment with erotic pleasures with one another, perhaps more clumsily than well-heeled, middle class ladies (and their accomplices – white middle class ‘honorary ladies’ who like to think of themselves as ‘new men’) might appreciate, especially if guilt about their sheltered, relatively prosperous upbringing has driven them into social work. Criminalising these children and stigmatising them forever hardly sounds like social progress; and yet this is what is happening. Sex, including any form of erotic play, is strictly verboten in our new, ‘progressive’ regime of ‘sex = abuse’ moralism. So intent has this regime become on rooting out monsters, it is now herding large numbers of ordinary, harmless boys and men, and boys and men in particular are significantly more likely to be ensnared by its furiously swooping net, into the same box as dangerous rapists and violent sexual psychopaths.
I am one of these ordinary men; my ‘crime’ was to entertain impossible and politically incorrect erotic fantasies: fantasies which, like most people, I was no more preparing to enact than I was planning to travel the universe in the Tardis (also a wishful fantasy I frequently day-dreamed about), in such a form that the protectionists could identify me. In other words, rather than confining my imaginings to the space between my ears, I made the fatal mistake of using the erotica available on the internet to augment what were essentially private and never-to-be enacted (in speech or deed) erotic daydreams. Moreover, I now think that the form of these daydreams was itself shaped by the images available on the net, which is another impertinent affront to the our moral rulers, who hold that erotic desire is fixed and essential, as opposed to fluid and mutable. To spare you further speculation, I accessed what is presently called ‘Child Pornography’. And then I was symbolically executed for it – a form of death (social extermination) which is intended to last until the end of one’s biological life, however long that may take . (3)
The terms used are particularly carefully selected. To the morally righteous, the word ‘pornography’ immediately conveys a Lot of Very Bad Things. Place the word ‘child’ in front, and you have “a lot of very bad things being done to children”. Recently, the term ‘child porn’ seems to have been deprivileged by salvationists in favour of the phrase ‘images of child abuse.’ Police officers are now prone to announce that the pictures they have found on some sad, hapless fool’s hard drive “are not child porn – they are child abuse.” More accurate terms like erotica – even ‘child erotica’ - won’t do; they don’t sufficiently convey the moralist’s self-promoted quest to be eradicating Pure Evil.
I’ll say more about this politically and emotionally overloaded term ‘child porn’, or its more pompous legal version, ‘indecent images’ a little later. It is perhaps worth noting at this point, however, that, in the eighteenth century, the moralists of the day had singled out children as the main perpetrators of child abuse, on the basis that they were abusing and corrupting themselves; masturbation was widely regarded as self-abuse, and any child unfortunate enough to be caught out would be subject to merciless punishment. Whilst we may now find such extremism bizarre, there remains a powerful continuity as the word ‘abuse’ is to this day being used to cover what, in a less frantic context, would simply be called ‘pleasure’. For now, though, I would like to share a speculation: as most of us know, when we are not in the company of moralistic zealots, there is a universal human disposition to fantasize erotic scenarios that are wholly incompatible with the subject’s own interpersonal conduct and ethical practises. There is not the slightest danger, for most people, that these scenarios will ever get actualised, not least because they are literally impossible: no matter how assiduously I imagine myself as a thirteen year old, I cannot literally become one. As more than a century of psychoanalysis has argued, only psychotics can believe this, because they cannot distinguish between fantasy and reality, word and deed, symbol and thing.
For the vast majority of people, erotic fantasies (and the more politically incorrect, the more erotically beguiling they become) are, in effect, intrapsychic resorts that one takes vacations in: ‘time out’ zones from the strain, tedium and outright distress of everyday social life. As such, they provide instantly accessible inner retreats where we are not obliged to be polite or considerate, just appetitive and inventively playful. The point is that they enable people to experiment with versions of themselves which it would be wholly impossible to enact. Beneath the skin, in fantasy, the most boring accountant can imagine himself as a Casanova, the most earnest politician can be a porn star, and the most upright judge can experience being soundly disciplined by a whip-lashing dominatrix. The fattest, baldest, middle-aged man can imagine himself as a lissom boy, exploring sexuality anew.
The man (or woman) who privately indulges obscene fantasies about a work colleague; the woman who imagines being involved in vigorous and rough sexual intercourse with a priapic barbarian; the adolescent who imagines improbably Olympian sex with his or her teacher, or with the boy or girl next door: very few of these people are using such erotic fantasies as preludes to action. They are substitutes for action, internal alternatives to prescribed social conduct. It was once proclaimed by another wing of the guardians of public morality that drugs were for people who can’t handle reality; libertarians reversed this to ‘reality is for people who can’t handle drugs’. I think much the same can be said for erotic fantasy: social ‘reality’, that corporately managed fiction, continuously shaped and manufactured by the vast, digital simulacrum we acquiesce in as our only vantage point on life, is the life-raft for those terrified of their own erotic imagination. Assuming that the majority of people are ordinary neurotic individuals like most of the human species (a degree of neurosis, as Freud suggested, is unavoidable in contemporary life), none of them (us) would consider putting these scenarios into practise; in fact, for most, to do so – or to have them exposed - would be deeply traumatic and repugnant.
Authoritarian moralists, with their insistence on simplicity, however, will have none of this complex (i.e., perverted) argumentation. Using a crudely reductionist psychology, which simply ignores both the unconscious and the ineradicable ambiguity of speech, language and action in human affairs, they render such fantasies as intentions, perched transparently on the surface of behaviour, which any right thinking person (by which they mean, I think, tabloid-indoctrinated imbecile) is obliged to deplore in the most vitriolic fashion. Great violence is committed when byzantine, paradoxical and profoundly ambiguous phenomena are simplified into a vulgar ‘this means that’ psychologism.
But if grandstanding politicians, desperate to secure popular support from an electorate they mistrust and feel fearfully disconnected from, declare on the say-so of authoritarian moralists (who claim to speak for us all), that certain reveries must be criminalised, the sort of thing that nobody (no ‘decent’ person) ought to be imagining, just picture what would happen if the Home Office developed a forensic instrument capable of detecting illicit fantasies in the mind, rather than on the computer hard drive (does anyone, really have nothing they would prefer to sexually hide? No fantasy, no daydream, no masturbation scenario?). Pretty well everyone would end up on the Sex Offender’s Register, and, if current sentencing policies were pursued, large areas of land would have to be surrendered for a massive new building development: Her Majesty’s Prisons.
Manufacturing Monsters
Those of us who have been scapegoated and stigmatised (if not literally destroyed – significant numbers have committed suicide) by this crusade against politically incorrect erotic fantasies know that, despite the claims that ‘Britain’s paedophiles’ (4) are finally being flushed out and rounded up for incarceration, we are actually not only rather ordinary men, but wholly indistinguishable from all other ordinary human beings. I don’t mean that we have all been exceedingly cunning in concealing our evil predilections, although concealment becomes horribly unavoidable once one comes across these images.(5) I mean that we are ordinary human beings. We are in the midst of a moral panic which has elevated the simple viewing – solitarily and in private - of something called ‘child porn’ into a crimen exceptum.(6) Like the European witch trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, mere accusation is enough to seal your doom.
Witchcraft was the seventeenth century version of the crimen exceptum, the crime that a dominant moral ideology designates as so heinous that the normal processes of justice and due process must be suspended, and punishment must be seen to be exemplary (merciless and ruinous). But, unlike the unfortunate witches, accusation alone is no longer necessary to set the processes of personal destruction by the State flying. In our new age of information technology, personal accusation can be regarded as wholly irrelevant, in fact. All that is required is that your credit card number appears on a site designated by the Authorities as a purveyor of illegal pictures. But perhaps even worse, despite the very real probability that many of the victims of Operation Ore had hitherto been wholly blameless victims of credit card fraud, if you actually did access forbidden pictures, accidentally or intentionally, this alone will convict you. To the police and the Child Salvationists, the act of looking at what they consider to be the wrong sort of pictures means that you are a rapist, a molester, a ‘beast.’ By adopting and promoting a crude ‘this means that’/’that causes this’ psychology, they have found that they can juridically crucify those they have indiscriminately netted, with the eager connivance of both prosecution lawyers and an army of pre-emptively disgusted judges. The academic, Laura Kipnis, has written movingly and intelligently about the hysterical, vicious life-sentence passed on an essentially gentle, kind-hearted gay man (Daniel Depew) in the USA. DePew, in his spare time, took part in consensual adult sadomasochistic sex. For this, and for talking fantasy with another fantasist, his life was destroyed. Referring to the criminal justice system (a critique which could equally well be directed at that in the UK), Kipnis writes:
‘They regarded the violence of his fantasies, and the consensual violence of his sex play, as “evidence” and proof beyond reasonable doubt – as if this could exist in anything but a psychological cartoon world – that he would, without question, have committed violence against a fictional, non-existent child. In the stripped down good-guy, bad-guy psychological universe invented by U.S. prosecutors, where fantasy equals intent, and role-playing makes it real, how many thousands of new prisons – each the size of Texas – would it take to hold our new criminal class?” (7)
To make a monster, stuff everything you cannot acknowledge as part of your own psychosexual make-up onto a convenient scapegoat, and persecute without let or hindrance. Psychoanalysis understands, which I think is why it is systematically ignored by the State in favour of a mere technology, cognitive behavioural psychology, that simply splitting undesirable qualities away from one’s preferred self image and dumping them onto someone else is a form of righteousness forever threatened by what it is excluding, because the exclusion itself (‘them’ not ‘us’, ‘him’ not ‘me’) is a gigantic lie. Beyond the ethics of individual conduct, however, in the material world of bids for budgets, lucrative careers are being built upon this very same lie. The child protection industry provides a particularly rewarding career path. Its predominant credo, despite the fact that most cruelty to children (humiliation, neglect, coldness, violence) is committed by family members, is ‘net the paedos!’
Those of us who have been netted, if we have not collapsed into compliant, soul-murdered, post-torture Winston Smiths, have a rather different story to tell.
What actually distinguishes us from everyone else is that we have all experienced a violent transposition. One minute, we were unexceptionably ordinary people, who were quietly getting on with our lives, earning a living and raising our children; the next, we were transmogriphied into the modern-day equivalent of the seventeenth century witch, forced to bear the virtually lethal disfigurement of a politically and juridically enforced identity which says nothing truthful or useful about us as individuals but, in fact, proclaims much (if not all) that is merely vituperative (and nearly schizophrenic) claptrap. Although these experiences are lived at an all too agonisingly personal level, they are, as I hope to argue, the deliberate and intended effects of overweeningly powerful (and covertly sadistic) political processes and agencies. If power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, we are living through an era in which a coalition of political interest groups has achieved an unassailable position of social influence. To question this interest coalition is to court social (and quite probably physical) annihilation.
In another time, this might have been seen as bad news for freedom of thought and critical intelligence. Today, unquestioning acquiescence in what amounts to a kind of puritanical absolutism is depicted as the hallmark of moral righteousness. We are, perhaps, never more dangerous than when we are convinced that we are acting for the moral good; it justifies us in purging the social body of those we believe to be moral pollutants. History is littered with such purges, as the piling remains of those whose fate it was to be expunged for the good of the moral order tragically testify. Presently, a rather foul odour is rising from our contemporary exercise in social purging, and those responsible for it are (predictably) blaming the stench on their victims.
The new rule of law – the Dictatorship of the Victim
Before thinking any further about these victims, almost immediately I have to declare that I have some trouble with the word ‘victim’. The current liberal-mainstream position, engineered and fashioned by some unpalatably rigid ideologues, as I will argue, is that victims of crime, and especially sexual crime, are routinely ignored. The electoral constituencies of the dyspeptically right-wing, the hang ‘em, flog ‘em, lock ‘em up and throw-away-the-key vote, has consistently been privileged by our ‘progressive’ government over saner and more nuanced analyses, partly because the latter cannot be comprehended by the British tabloids as anything other than limp-wristed hand-wringing. The new received wisdom is that the Law has to be rebalanced in favour of victims; victim law holds that legal safeguards to ensure that justice is seen to be done have favoured the perpetrators far too much. So, decency demands that we introduce summary justice wherever possible, curtail the tedious, costly and uncertain role of the jury system, redefine rape so that it effectively means any kind of sexual involvement which a ‘victim’ may subsequently decide was unwelcome or unpleasant, even if he/she fully participated, consensually, on the occasion in question, and reassure ‘the public’ that the legal system is on their side.
‘The public’, is of course, a highly specular entity; it refracts the light very differently depending on what angle you approach it. It is usually defined as ‘decent’, ‘law-abiding’, ‘hard-working’ and as constituting a long-suffering ‘silent majority’. This ‘public’ is shaped like a family, but as Simon Watney showed in his brilliant work on media representations of the AIDS crisis when it first broke in the 1980s, it is more likely to include your pet dog than your gay brother or sister. (8) ‘It’ in other words, does not ‘really’ exist – there are many publics and many ‘counterpublics’ (9) (ref Michael Warner – Publics and Counterpublics) – loose associations and more organised groupings of those who find the dominant storylines enacting the prescriptions of the ‘silent majority’ deeply injurious and oppressive, from gay and lesbian people to ‘sex-positive’ feminists, Marxists to social libertarians (it is possible, of course, to find oneself belonging to each of these loose sets). The absurdly fictional status of the decent, hard working, unified ‘public’ does not deter mainstream politicians from trampling over one another in order to appeal to ‘it.’ They have discovered that this ‘public’ has an insatiable appetite for draconian and illiberal ‘law and order’ measures, and that ‘it’ is sick of the pervasive disregard for ‘victims’.
But there is a flaw in this logic; far from being the age of indifference, requiring heroic politicians and militant, self-appointed tribunes of the underdog (such as the countless NGOs speaking for, although never having actually been elected by, ‘victims’) to restructure society in favour of the victim, are we not living in the age of the victim? In our present culture of narcissism (10) (ref. Christopher Lasch), the victim is endlessly exhorted not only to pronounce authoritatively on his or her experience of victimhood (today, if you’re a victim of something, you’re also automatically an expert on it) but to bite back, to obtain talion law redress.
There is, of course, nothing heroic or brave in giving voice to inveterate majoritarian prejudices; there never has been. Moral Utopia doesn’t really exist, not with our inherently flawed and aberrant species. Attempts to bring it into being have inevitably ended in the death camp and the gulag (or, in the USA and the UK, the greatest number of incarcerated people in the western world). Yet today, to call the contemporary mouthpiece of future Utopia into question (i.e., the victim), to be sceptical, to wonder whether there might be other co-ordinates to the subject’s misery, is presently all too easily seen as not merely the height of insensitivity, but as a variety of ‘abuse’. If you can package yourself as the right kind of ‘victim’, you will get not merely the ear, but the active support of the body of government and state (law enforcement and the judiciary); mainstream politicians will clamber over one another in unseemly earnestness to be seen as the most victim-cuddly, and the State and the ‘free’ (i.e., corporately directed and ruthlessly populist) press will join this moral beauty parade fulsomely and without reservation.
I’ll attempt to justify the scare quotes a little later. For now, I’ll just confess that I have belatedly come to hold a profound scepticism toward the term ‘victim’. I cannot imagine anyone sanely suggesting that we ought not to empathise with the victims of rape, of violent assault, of natural disasters and of political genocide. But in the age of victimology, the definition of ‘victim’ has become insanely elastic. I can be victimised by my neighbour’s cigarette smoke, fatness, alcohol consumption, sense of humour, way of looking at me, way of ignoring me, way of taking the piss out of me (actively or passively), way of talking, way of failing to appreciate my outstanding talent, way of over-estimating me, way of emitting breath and other body odours I find alien. Here is University of Illinois feminist theorist Sandra Lee Bartky describing her ‘sexual assault’ in 1990:
“It was a fine spring day, and with an utter lack of self-consciousness, I am bouncing down the street. Suddenly catcalls and whistles fill the air. These noises are clearly sexual in intent and they are meant for me; they come from across the street. I freeze. As Sartre would say, I have been petrified by the gaze of the Other. My face flushes and my motions become stiff and self-conscious. The body which only a moment before I inhabited with such ease now floods my consciousness. I have been made into an object. Blissfully unaware, breasts bouncing, eyes on the birds in the trees, I could have passed by without having been turned to stone. But I must be made to know that I am a “nice piece of ass”: I must be made to see myself as they see me. There is an element of compulsion in … this Being-made-to-be-aware of one’s own flesh: like being made to apologize, it is humiliating. What I describe seems less the expression of a healthy eroticism than a ritual of subjugation.”
Sandra Lee Bartky (1990) Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression New York: Routledge, p. 27 (Quoted in Christina Hoff Sommers (1994) Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women New York: Touchstone, 2005, p. 27)
“I have been made into an object; I must be made to see myself as they see me; less the expression of a healthy eroticism than a ritual of subjugation.” These are some rather heavy accusations to hurl at a bunch of working class construction workers, who might well have been the catcallers and whistlers Bartky founds so odious. If a young man finds bouncing breasts erotically enjoyable, Bartky seems to think he is a potential rapist. Who is the more somatically alienated – the observer who recognises the erotic beauty of a ‘nice piece of ass’, or the mature woman who, bouncing her breasts, can only think about birdies in trees? Victorian girls and women were brought up in enforced ignorance of their clitorises, vaginas, and erotic possibilities. Has contemporary ‘victim’ feminism really got nothing else to offer modern women?
At the risk of sounding sentimental, or at least of searching for a mythological golden past, most of the ‘victimisations’ new brand feminist fundamentalism finds so intolerable would have been shrugged off as entirely insignificant by people of my parents’ generation. Perhaps they were too preoccupied with fighting off Hitlerite fascism, too united in hope for a more humane and truly democratic social order, to worry about these trivialities. Without realising it themselves, they – men and women together - belonged to a truly heroic generation. But in the midst or air raids, the omnipresent threat of invasion, and the likelihood of defeat and death, they were far more robustly optimistic and connected to one another than our 21st Century moral reformers. They had something we are losing, frighteningly quickly: they had social solidarity and space. By contrast, our time is suffused with the experience of alienated, disconnected solitude, along with an almost frantic feeling of overcrowdedness.
The multiculturalist injunction to celebrate diversity and learn to practise the arts of toleration seems to work better in spaciously affluent middle class circles than in densely packed, working class ones. Those who populate the latter know, through the less mediated, raw experience of being crammed into confined and under-resourced spaces together, that the problem of neighbourly toleration has nothing to do with moral injunctions to be more tolerant, and everything to do with tolerable proximity. If you are forced, cheek by jowl, nose to armpit, up against someone else – let’s say, on a crowded tube train in rush hour London – even a someone else you might have erotically fancied from a certain distance, you may suddenly feel invaded by unwelcome bodily messages, from bacterial odours to unexpectedly reciprocated desire (or rejection). Too much proximity, when it is involuntary, sudden, chronic or unbidden, breeds a desire for eradication, or at least distance (‘send them home!’).
Jews and dark-skinned people were until recently the primary scapegoats of social purity movements; today such vulgar racism is much less permissible, at a time when the quest for an imaginary scapegoat is possibly even more desperate. Whilst we once blamed our poverty and immiseration on the money-grabbing Jew or the feckless black, the age of paranoid affluence has not released us from our drive to find functional scapegoats. As greater prosperity has not resulted in greater brotherly love or inter-cultural peace, we are still on the hunt for suitable fall-guys to blame for our unease and unhappiness. Now that it no longer seems plausible to revile people simply on ethnic or skin colour grounds (or at least not openly), who do we have to invent in order to glue ‘us’ (the ‘social fabric’, ‘the public’) together? Who can we not only hate, but love to hate, now that we can’t so easily parade our enjoyment of openly racist bull*bleep*ting? In order to prevent myriad real social antagonisms from shredding the ‘social fabric’ into tattered threads, in order to conserve the fiction of a unified ‘us’, we seem to need someone else to hate. Enter the ‘Sex Offender.’
Sex Offenders: Our New Imaginary Monsters
Whilst of course there are major differences between the specific social aversion I am getting at and vulgar racism, there are nonetheless some striking parallels. The racist solution to the problem of proximity is: get rid of the alien. The delusion here is the notion that it is possible to naturalise an inherent social conflict, to literally transform an ineradicable social contradiction into a pre- (or non-) social biological problem. In other words, the fantasy operating in this scenario is that of a spurious social-organic wholeness: ‘we’ all live together in an essentially harmonious natural order (‘the public’), which is threatened and perturbed only by malignantly deviant outsiders. But fantasies are not simply so much Scotch mist, mere background music to the hard realities of life; they can be profoundly, and terrifyingly, real in their social effects, provided that the person in question believes the operative fantasy. If I can be persuaded that people can be categorised into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ types (or races), and that one of these categories has now become an intolerable social cancer, I might also become persuaded that they must be liquidated for the good of society, for the future health of the nation, for my children’s safety. But if we can purchase some distance from these pervasive and vigorously repeated truth-claims, if we can get our proximity right and recover some necessary scepticism, we are immediately confronted with a conundrum: just how do we go about categorising who is an alien, and who is a (legitimate) neighbour (someone like us)?
So far as our species has been in the ascendant, our efforts to make this discrimination have been little short of horrendous. History unequivocally shows us (and history is rarely unequivocal) that the more of the ‘inferior race’ you exterminate, the more threatening the remainder appear to be, and the more the effort to eradicate, to cleanse, must be redoubled, intensified, and ruthlessly purged of luxurious sentimentalities such as empathy and compassion (ref Zizek The Metastases of Enjoyment). The Nazis, as Zizek reveals, were most virulently anti-Semitic in those parts of Germany where the Jewish population was smallest or non-existent, and they became ever more genocidal as the extermination programme advanced.
From a psychoanalytic point of view, when you commit an act of violence against others, you begin to fear that they want to do the same to you; so you’d better keep wiping them out, in case they get you. The more violent and sadistic you become, the more violence and sadism seem necessary. If you are trying to eradicate your own projected sadism, no matter how many kikes, ... I am a racist idiot!
In the contemporary moment, many of the advocates of social purity are unconcerned about racialised Others; their project is to eradicate sexualised (sexually labelled) Others. In other words, there has been a shift from populist campaigns for racial purity toward populist campaigns for sexual purity (many of the new militants would find any association with racist sentiments deeply offensive). And, at the risk of sounding a little melodramatic, I have painfully come to believe that the combative activists of this purification movement have been getting away with little short of murder, unchallenged by Left, Right or Centre (with a small number of honourable exceptions in each of these factions) for three decades. Their major instrument, the weapon of mass destruction they wield so mercilessly in the cause of their virtuousness, is shame. The sheer degree of venomously toxic shame they can now deploy, with the active collusion of our ‘free’ media and ‘neutral’ law enforcement agencies, has been on too many occasions literally lethal. And, to compound matters, these contemporary puritans have been hiding behind children to promote their fanatical credo.
Either our secular moral guardians are unimpeachably virtuous in their project, or they owe their unassailable domination to a highly successful campaign of moral terrorism which has effectively menaced and browbeaten any potential dissent into silence. If the latter scenario is the truer - and, not being especially persuaded by the truth claims of the earnestly politically correct, I believe it to be the more likely - they have achieved this by means of spuriously alarming propaganda, which has enabled them to assume a position of frankly despotic power. But that is only part of the story; for any propaganda to ‘take’, it has to be believed. If believers are as complicit as disseminators in perpetrating inhumanity, why are so many people willing to believe the lurid and improbable propaganda of the child salvationists?
(1) Christopher Bollas (1992) “The Fascist State of Mind” in Christopher Bollas (1992) Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience London and New York: Routledge
(2) This was the zealous response by numerous professional child saviours to work conducted – very rigorously and scientifically – by the American psychologists Bruce Rind, Philip Tromovitch and Robert Bauserman.
(3) Symbolic execution can be reproduced ad infinitum, in a way that physical execution cannot. Anyone unfortunate enough to end up on the Sex Offender’s Register can expect a lifetime of intrusive ‘supervision’ by semi-literate policemen and ever ‘tougher’ legislation by vacuous politicians eager to obtain populist approval.
(4) This was the term used by a short series of flatteringly uncritical BBC 2 documentaries, slavishly adopting the PR from Scotland Yard’s Paedophile Unit The Hunt for Britain's Paedophiles – BBC 2, 2002 (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/2029670.stm)
covering the UK police’s arrest of large numbers of men suspected of viewing internet child pornography. These documentaries were effectively free promotional videos on a mass scale for the UK police’s ‘Operation Ore’, which was ‘rolled out’ to a fanfare of largely uncritical, not to say snarlingly and gnashingly positive, media coverage in May 2002
(5) Simple possession of any such images, even if accidentally viewed, is illegal under present law and there is no defence; any evidence of possession will result, if detected, in criminal prosecution, almost certainly imprisonment and the inevitable loss of employment that this entails, followed by years, probably life, on the Sex Offender’s Register, and compulsory ‘treatment’.
(6) I am grateful to the tireless work of Brian Rothery, editor of the excellent web-site www.inquisition21.com, for drawing my attention to this historical phenomenon.
(7) Laura Kipnis (1996) Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press (pp 11-12).
(8) This was Leo Bersani’s observation, in his remarkable essay of 1987 Is the Rectum a Grave?, which began life as a review of Watney’s book.
Copyright © Inquisition 21st century
Go to Chapter 2.
Created on 04/10/2009 08:37 AM by Editor
Updated on 08/18/2009 11:28 AM by Editor
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