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| Chapter 2.
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Chapter 2. Marketing Revulsion and Making Up People
“What kind of a society sends its citizens to prison for their fantasies?”
Laura Kipnis. (1)
Terry Eagleton began his critique of Richard Dawkins’ best-selling book The God Delusion with these words:
“Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince.” (2)
Try imagining someone holding forth on human sexuality whose only acquaintance with the subject is ‘A Manual of Pervert-Spotting’ by Dr Michelle Noncemangler, Director of the charity ‘Protect Our Kids!’, and you will have some idea of what passes for knowledge amongst law enforcement officers. I am, of course, resorting to the caricature I disparaged in the last chapter but, I fear, only minimally. To answer Laura Kipnis’ question above: we are the kind of society which sends its citizens to gaol for their fantasies.
The ‘how’ component of this question is relatively easy to discern: place enormous powers in the hands of police officers to investigate a subject area they simply lack the education, training and intellectual resources to comprehend, and let all else follow. This is not meant as a crude ‘all policemen are thick’ diatribe; I would not dispute that many police officers are honourable, courageous and even heroic. But it is to raise an important question about the nature, and quality, of police ‘evidence’ in the field of so-called sexual offences. If one wouldn’t approach a pork butcher to conduct neurosurgery on one’s spine, why allow a policeman to make black and white judgments about human sexuality?
Unless you believe that Esther Rantzen is the pinnacle of intellectual achievement in this field, you ought, perhaps, to be entertaining some serious doubts. Without wishing to sound condescending, if you suspect that thinkers such as Plato, Shakespeare, Wilde, Freud, and Foucault may have thought rather more deeply about sexuality than the bloke down the pub (or various oft-quoted representatives of the Association of Chief Police Officers, for that matter), you ought to have serious qualms about the quality of evidence collected by officers who can’t spell reliably or write complex sentences. But ‘how’ doesn’t deal with ‘why?’ What has happened to get us into this predicament, and why have we allowed it?
Popular Horrors
In our new age of illiberal liberalism, a deeply censorious form of compulsory politeness which insists that everyone has to sign up to the same vision of the good life or face punishment, the mainstream view, as with victimhood more generally, is that child abuse remains a taboo subject, which no one wants to address openly and vigorously. The victimologist vanguard has to keep pushing its salvationist programme through, against appalling Establishment (and common) indifference.
But even a moment’s reflection exposes this embattled posturing as something of an overstatement, to say the least. There is no indifference, whether in that mythical beast the ‘general public’ or its creator, the mainstream media, or the Establishment. In fact, the exact opposite is true: people are hugely interested in the rampantly metastasising discourse of child abuse, especially child sexual abuse. People want more and more stories, more and more lurid details, and the media are only too happy to feed them by the tub-full, almost invariably in the form of bovinely uncritical regurgitations of the crude propaganda and sexual hysteria peddled out by what I call the Child Exploitation Industry.
There is virtually never any scepticism, any independent critical inquiry, about these terrifying (and terrorising) claims and assertions. But, presently, this is a subject in which our self-appointed moral guardians have seen to it that scepticism is Not Permitted. You are either ‘for’ Child Protection, or you are against it. If you are suspected of falling into the latter camp, you are not merely exercising your right, in a free society, to a sceptical or minority point of view. You are an enemy, and quite probably an enemy harbouring disgusting and vile tendencies: a ‘pervert’s apologist’ at best, if not an example of that very monster everyone loves to hate – ‘the’ Paedophile. Something called ‘society’, always assumed, never defined, must, at all costs, be defended against this evil beast.
So, when senior policemen proclaim that parents must snoop on their teenage kids’ internet activities, and must accept that police officers posing as teenagers should inveigle themselves into youngsters’ internet social networking forums, eavesdropping on their intimate communications with friends and peers, monitoring their every word and posted photograph, because ‘it is estimated that up to 50,000 sexual predators are on-line at any one time’, you must accept such assertions on trust, just as most journalists do.
50,000 Predatory Perverts Prowling On-Line
Although I promised in my Introduction not to bore the reader with statistics, it might be enlightening to spend a little time here on them, not least because this particular ‘estimate’ is pure moonshine, as would become apparent after a few moments sober questioning. That most journalists wholly failed to subject it to any kind of critical scrutiny in all of the countries where it was peddled (the USA, Canada and the UK being the most prominent) is a phenomenon which justly acquires the status of a symptomatic act. Most journalists, including those in the so-called ‘quality’ (broadsheet) end of the newspaper and electronic media market, simply regurgitated this number as a fact.
A notable exception to this lamentable trend, however, was provided by journalist Dan Gardner, who took issue with the number and subjected it to critical enquiry, as one would have hoped any journalist worthy of the title would have done. What he found is worth noting . (3) Gardner offered the following cautionary advice to anyone coming across such startlingly high, and tidy, numbers:
“There’s one obvious reason to be at least a little suspicious. It’s a round number. A very round number. It’s not 47,000 or 53,500. It is 50,000. And 50,000 is just the sort of perfectly round number people pluck out of the air when they make a wild guess.”
p.33
Gardner is picking up on an interesting point: this is not the first time evangelical salvationists have resorted to dodgy statistics. Judith Levine, in her courageous and chilling account of the rise of militant child salvationism in the original child porn panic of the 1970s, noted similar statistical fictions. Virtually all were simply recycled, as they are now, by credulous and guileless journalists. Levine recalls that, before 1976, the child pornographer was …
‘… a feeble beast and an even worse businessman. In fact, he was almost bankrupt. Raids aimed at cleaning up Times Square for the Democratic Convention uncovered only a miniscule cache of kiddie-porn. But those few stacks of dusty, decades-old black-and-white rags, already illegal, were enough to launch a crusade.” (4) (Levine p. 33)
The crusaders were led by a team that would epitomise the anti-child-porn forces – a child psychiatrist and a policeman (in 1976, they were Dr Judianne Densen-Gerber and Sergeant Lloyd Martin, a vice cop). As Levine continues:
“The two careened from sea to sea, stoking outsized claims. Before a congressional committee in 1977, Densen-Gerber estimated that 1.2 million children were victims of child prostitution and pornography, including “snuff” films in which they were killed for viewers’ titillation. Martin travelled the country orating speeches of evangelical fervor, warning America on one Christian television show, for instance, that “pedophiles actually wait for babies to be born so that, just minutes after birth, they can grab the post-fetuses and sexually victimize them.” At that 1977 congressional committee, he declared that the sexual exploitation of children was “worse than homicide.” (5) (Levine, p.33)
As you might by now be predicting, Levine proceeds to reveal that, a few years later, police testified that child porn had never been more than a boutique business even in its modest heyday of the 1960s. Moreover, the 1.2 million number, which Densen-Gerber subsequently doubled, was later exposed as the arbitrarily quadrupled figure one author said he’d ‘thrown out’ to get a reaction from the law enforcement community (Levine, p.33). Interestingly, Levine notes that these champions of compassion and moral rectitude would soon slip ignominiously from public esteem and prominence: Densen-Gerber under suspicions of embezzling public monies and employing coercive and humiliating methods at Odyssey House (the drug-rehabilitation empire she had previously founded), Martin removed from his post at the LAPD for harassing witnesses and falsifying evidence.
Despite these dishonourable endings, however, the crusaders’ work, based as we now know on sensationalism, insane exaggeration and plain dishonesty, had been accomplished. On the basis of flummery, cant and deceit, Congress passed the Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation Act of 1977, prohibiting the production and commercial distribution of obscene depictions of children younger than sixteen. Politicians and campaigners in the UK, as ever, standing downwind of American manias and sniffing eagerly, followed a similar trajectory. Virtually identical claims about prevalence and extent were made, all of them eagerly lapped up by a pre-emptively outraged media. The culmination was even more draconian than the American legislation. In 1978 the Protection of Children Act reached the statute book, making the simple possession of such material by private individuals an offence, as opposed to its distribution and commercial production.
In the United States, as Levine notes, one of the first casualties of the new law was Show Me!, a sex education book for prepubescent children featuring explicit photographs of children, from around six to their early teens, engaged in sex play. Although it seems incredible to our paedophile-obsessed contemporary sensibilities, the book was showered with awards when it was first published in 1970. By 1978, it was being seized in police raids and pulped. Keeping children in enforced ignorance about erotic pleasure was clearly what passed as morality for the crusaders.
Returning to the present and the‘50,000 internet predators’, a small degree of critical intelligence did surface amongst some journalists. In the United States, National Public Radio established that the person who had quoted this figure to the television programme Dateline, which, of course, then proceeded to broadcast it without any attempt at verification, was an FBI agent named Ken Lanning. Speaking now to a journalist from NPR who was indeed trying to establish where Lanning had got it from, he replied “I didn’t know where it came from. I couldn’t confirm it, but I couldn’t refute it either, but I felt it was a fairly reasonable figure.” (Gardner, p35)
A figure which could not be sourced, which was actually nothing more than a piece of lurid imagination plucked from the ether for propagandistic purposes, was nonetheless circulated widely throughout the media because, with no evidence whatsoever, an FBI agent thought it sounded reasonable. Lanning went on to note a curious coincidence that Gardner had already picked up on: 50,000 was the figure quoted in the child abduction panic of the early 1980s (i.e., the number of children ‘it was estimated’ were being kidnapped by strangers annually). By the end of the decade, it was also the number of murders committed by Satanic cults. As Gardner notes, ‘These claims, widely reported and believed at the time, were later revealed to be nothing more than hysterical guesses that become ‘fact’ in the retelling’(p 35). Perhaps the twin-like resemblance of the online predator number to these earlier frenzies made it sound ‘fairly reasonable’ to Lanning (although ‘suspiciously familiar’ would have been a more truthful evaluation).
If news and current affairs programmes carry hair-raising and horrifying stories of child abduction, rape and murder, the inevitable revulsion and fear will take root in the audiences. But fear and revulsion are not especially useful guides to sane risk evaluation, especially when it comes to our favourite contemporary hate: crime (and especially sexual crime). Gardener observes astutely that mainstream news media, both broadcast and print varieties, have an almost obsessive preoccupation with crimes, but not with crime. To use his example, we will get to hear over and over again about the little old lady held up at gunpoint. But we will very rarely, if at all, hear about just how many little old ladies are being held up at gun point, whether more or fewer are being held up than in the past, who is holding them up and why, or what policies might protect little old ladies. As Gardner puts it:
“Rising crime means more crimes are committed. It’s easy to reflect that; simply run more stories of people assaulted and murdered. But falling crime means fewer crimes are being committed, a trend which cannot be captured by stories of individual crimes because a crime that is not committed is not a story. And so simply because the media focus on crimes while ignoring crime, rising crime will always get more attention than falling crime.”
(Gardner, p196)
And, I would add, the illusion of rising crime can be powerfully fostered even when, as presently, it is actually falling year on year on just about every objective scale used to measure it. ‘Paedophile abduction is no larger now than when records began – still infinitesimally small!” is not a headline. “Evil Paedo snatches kid from hotel apartment!” is.
Political grandstanding and irrational campaigns by unscrupulous salvationists have succeeded in elevating the ‘sex offender’ into the modern day witch. Sex offenders are seen as irredeemably and unreformably bad eggs, forever prey to uncontrollable sexual demiurges. But because a belief is popular does not make it true. As Gardner observes, many studies, including those of the U.S. Department of Justice, show sex offenders are less likely to commit another crime after release than other sorts of criminals (Gardner, p. 211). The UK Home Office has drawn similar conclusions. None of these findings, however, inform political decisions to draft ever more draconian laws. One final, spine-freezing paragraph from Gardner:
“Having warned of a threat, politicians must also come up with new ways to deal with it. In one month in 2006, the Louisiana state legislature passed 14 laws targeting sex offenders (an output one state governor justified on the grounds that ‘every time you turn on the news, some kid is getting abducted, raped, and murdered’). But after giving first offenders an automatic 25-year minimum sentence; after passing laws that allow for offenders who have served their sentence to be imprisoned indefinitely if they are deemed dangerous; after ordering released offenders to register and making their names, faces, addresses, and places of employment available on the Internet; after barring offenders from many forms of work; after banning them from living within 1,000 feet of schools, parks, and so many other places that they are often rendered homeless and driven out of town; after requiring released offenders to wear satellite tracking devices for the rest of their lives – what’s left? It’s a dilemma. … In the 2006 gubernatorial race in Georgia, one candidate – the lieutenant-governor – called for a crackdown on Internet luring. That put his opponent – the governor – in a bind. He couldn’t simply second the proposal. So the following day, the governor announced that if he were re-elected he would authorise juries to sentence child molesters to death.”
(Gardner, p13)
Gardner notes that, as in the UK, few of these policies are inspired by criminological research and even fewer actually contribute to public safety: sex offender registries might be wildly popular but there’s simply no reliable evidence that they work. When a task force convened by Canada’s federal government concluded a registry ‘would not significantly improve’ public safety, and the money spent on the registry would do more good elsewhere, the government went ahead anyway. Gardner reports that the minister in charge privately apologised to the civil servants handling the file. ‘It’s politics,’ he told them (Gardner, p.213).
So, with no reliable evidence to support their claims, the mouthpieces of the child exploitation industry continue to insist that the perverts are out there, waiting to ‘groom’ your son or daughter towards a rape, ‘looking at’ your child’s posted pictures and photos through paedophile’s eyes. You are not meant to ask how they came up with such a figure, nor when (or where) it originated, still less what extrapolations and presumptions are included within it. To raise such impertinent questions to the new defenders of society is to raise questions about yourself. The suspicion – very likely the accusation – will almost inevitably follow that you are the modern, secular counterpart of one of Satan’s Disciples.
If the Child Exploitation Industry wants us to believe that there is some indefinable but pervasive resistance to their project of exposing and punishing child abuse, it is a very peculiar form of resistance. Far from being characterised by mighty doors in the corridors of power being firmly shut and leant on from behind by an insouciant Establishment, it is more accurately depicted as a scene in which every door knocked, or even simply approached, swings wildly open on its hinges. As Stephen Bruhm and Natasha Hurley recently observed in an excellent collection of essays, (6) child protection, and, I would add, the increasingly draconian and ruinous punishments meted out to all those deemed to have been transgressors, has in the last two to three decades become the cornerstone of Western law.
From Compassion to Enjoyment
It is simplistic in the extreme to attribute the prevailing hunger for these stories, especially those featuring sexual abuse at the hands of our contemporary bogeyman, the child molester, purely to concern and care, although these qualities are undoubtedly also present. All ideologies require something real to hook into, and the ideology of ‘the child in danger’ is no exception. Real fellow feeling, real concern for the well-being of youngsters, does undoubtedly exist. But it can also be exploited, hijacked and sentimentally manipulated; and it is a major part of the ensuing argument that this has been happening on a massive and irrational scale.
Converting good-hearted solidarity into malignant, misanthropic paranoia has been the principal effect, if not the mission, of the Child Exploitation Industry, and they have been brilliantly successful in achieving their aims (and lucratively furthering their careers). Promoting something called ‘child protection’ or ‘child safety’, as extremely well-funded organisations like the British charities NSPCC and Kidscape do perennially with the dogged determination of fundamentalist mullahs, is of course simply code for promoting parental fear and insecurity.
This is ultimately the magic ingredient of their campaigns: exaggerated, irrational fear. They’d quite simply go bust without it. We are to suspect that everyone is a potential or actual child molester or abuser, simply masquerading as a respectable person. This just means that media-savvy campaigners for organisations like the NSPCC, which spends huge amounts of the money it raises from your pockets on self-promoting publicity, have worked out that ordinary human compassion can be hijacked by fear and twisted into vengeful paranoia.
But besides fear, there is another magic ingredient which I believe plays a major, if not the major, part in child abuse campaigns: enjoyment. If you can alloy fear to enjoyment, you are likely to have forged the most effective of ideologies. (7) These are more intimately interrelated, more complicit, than we want them to be; the horror movie genre is ample proof of the intense enjoyment accompanying fearful imagery, so long as a certain voyeuristic distance and detachment from the scene is guaranteed.
I am, of course, using the word ‘enjoyment’ in its psychoanalytic, as opposed to ordinary, sense. Enjoyment in everyday English is just another word for ‘pleasure.’ But the French have another word, a word which conjures a notion of pleasure pushed beyond its most extreme limit – a horrific delight, an obscene bliss where the distinction between pleasure and pain is shattered. Orgasm is often cited as the model; but try to imagine a scenario where orgasm has become boring and you want an even more convulsive experience. Then you are in the territory of jouissance. It is enjoyment in the French sense of jouissance that I am thinking of here. Scandalously, I am suggesting that, alongside the horror and disgust consciously experienced by those who avidly read about child abuse in the popular press, there is jouissance. Why keep returning to issues which are supposedly unbearably painful? Jouissance – obscene (off-scene), hidden enjoyment is almost certainly the answer. Our public, decent selves can be disgusted and outraged without compromising the addictive fascination of our obscene selves.
Power, as we saw in the previous chapter, no longer appears as the capricious whim of over-mighty warlords, kings or feudal barons, belching their way through sumptuous banquets as they send their minions to torch nearby villages. To repeat a point I mentioned earlier, power is now mediated by morality, law and economy, rather than invested in the body of a monarch or a clansman. But that does not mean that it is has become cuddly and benevolent. Power was mediated by morality, law and economy in Oscar Wilde’s day too, but that did not stop it from completely destroying him with the utmost ruthlessness and cruelty.
That most onlookers in his day were fully in agreement with the vindictive and ruinous judicial treatment meted out to him in no way justifies it; it simply reflects the form that sexual disgust, perhaps the most pernicious and irrational variety of disgust of all, took in his day. Wilde, notwithstanding his exhilarating intelligence, spellbinding talent, deep compassion and uncompromisingly courageous irreverence, was financially, socially, psychologically and, ultimately, physically destroyed for being judged a heretic – that ‘abominable and detestable crime against nature’, as it was called back then.
I referred in Chapter One to the great French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, who would have discerned the reasons for Wilde’s death with little difficulty: if you wholly exterminate someone’s symbolic stature, it is only a matter of time before the flesh and blood body follows. Humans are creatures of symbols, who also have bodies (although the human body, as soon as it is immersed in language, can never be merely a meat and bone entity – it is inescapably always a symbolic phenomenon, too). It is a commonplace assumption that, should the body suffer too much trauma, depletion, illness, wear and tear, etc., the symbolic being will shuttle off the mortal coil, too. It is perhaps less commonsensically registered that, should one’s symbolic status be destroyed, should one find that all the words, titles and descriptions that socially represent one have suddenly been turned to ashes, the death of the physical body is almost certain to follow very shortly. This is what happened to Wilde; he contracted cerebral meningitis whilst living as an impoverished outcast in France, and died on 30th November 1900 aged forty-six, just three years after his release from incarceration with hard labour. I think his bodily self could no longer survive the torture of symbolic annihilation, which, unlike physical death, one has to remain alive to.
His appallingly cruel destruction poses us twenty-first century dwellers with an intriguing question: is ‘heresy’, as a method of categorising and exterminating the ‘enemies of society’, now dead, or has it re-surfaced, with a new, contemporary brand name, in our midst? You guessed it - it has, and the new heretic is ‘the paedophile’.
From inappropriate acts to inappropriate persons
The definition of just what constitutes ‘the’ paedophile, as it is commonly used by the Child Exploitation Industry, is as confused and meaninglessly over-inclusive as the definition (actually, the indefinability) of sodomy was. It was Foucault who most elegantly drew out the constitutive confusions this term ineluctably carried with it in the juridical history of the West. Foucault’s analysis describes a kind of radical historical discontinuity between the age of sodomy and the age of sexuality. It is worth citing him at length here:
“… silence and secrecy are a shelter for power; but they also loosen its holds and provide for relatively obscure areas of tolerance. Consider for example the history of what was once “the” great sin against nature. The extreme discretion of the texts dealing with heresy – that utterly confused category – and the nearly universal reticence in talking about it made possible a twofold operation: on the one hand, there was an extreme severity (punishment by fire was meted out until well into the eighteenth century, without there being any substantial protest expressed before the middle of the century), and on the other hand, a tolerance that must have been widespread (which one can deduce from the infrequency of judicial sentences, and which one glimpses more directly through certain statements concerning societies of men that were thought to exist in the army or in the courts. There is no question that the appearance in nineteenth century psychiatry, jurisprudence and literature of a whole series of discourses on the species and subspecies of homosexuality, inversion, pederasty and “psychic hermaphrodism” made possible a strong advance of social controls into this area of “perversity”; but it also made possible the formation of a “reverse” discourse: homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or “naturality” be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified.” Michel Foucault, 1976, p. 101. (8)
In this book above all others in his oeuvre, Foucault brilliantly exposes the way in which modern power functions. Today, sex is policed not by silence but by voluminous and ceaseless talk. In Foucault’s language, this incessant speech constitutes what he calls the ‘deployment’ of continually proliferating ‘discourses’ of social regulation, such as medical, psychological, psychiatric, etc., accounts. The new form of law does not prohibit an underlying deviance, even when it claims to be doing so, but actively produces new forms of deviance which it then polices: all descriptions, from Foucault’s point of view, are also constructions.
The more we talk, the more we create the categories of deviance available for regulation, a process which of course results in the call for ever more resources to pour into the policing and regulating industries. If it is now regarded as true that paedophilia is our most menacing social evil, if, as Donald Findlater of the child abuse charity The Lucy Faithful Foundation has argued, “We know the problem [of paedophilia] is of monstrous proportions ...”, (9) Foucault would draw his attention to the fact that this is largely because people like him and the organisations he and his fellow crusaders make their living in have made it so. This does not mean that campaigners have merely raised public consciousness about an appalling problem that had hitherto been ignored; it means, from a Foucauldian point of view, that they have largely manufactured a problem and secured the funding and media repetition necessary to keep on stoking it up.
In an extraordinary discussion broadcast in France on 4th April 1978 by France-Culture, Foucault was joined by two other prominent radical intellectuals of the era, Guy Hocquenghem and Jean Danet. They talked specifically about the production of paedophilia . (10) The debate is remarkable not only for its intellectual acuity but also because, from our present day vantage point, it would be hard to imagine it being broadcast anywhere today. They were, perhaps, beginning to articulate a form of the ‘reverse discourse’ Foucault described in the quotation above, the counter-response of those positioned by the dominant discourse as deviant (you can call a chicken an ‘ephebofowl’ without consequence, but if you call a human being one, he might begin to answer back).
Addressing the ‘decency/indecency’ paradigm that was being articulated by jurists, doctors and psychologists since the nineteenth century, the discussion grappled with the way in which children, or, rather, the concept of children, were being aggressively recruited to strengthen regulatory practises. Early in the discussion, after noting that a moment of apparent sexual liberalism in the 1960s and early 70s was now being ferociously closed down by the authorities, Guy Hocquenghem had this to say (remember, this is 1978):
“These new arguments are essentially about childhood, that is to say, about the exploitation of popular sentiment and its spontaneous horror of anything that links sex with the child. Thus an article in the Nouvel Observateur begins with a few remarks to the effect “pornography involving children is the ultimate American nightmare and no doubt the most terrible in a country fertile in scandals.” When someone says that child pornography is the most terrible of present-day scandals, one cannot but be struck by the disproportion between this – child pornography, which is not even prostitution – and everything that is happening in the world today – what the Blacks have to put up with in the United States, for instance.”
(Kritzman, ed., p 273)
Had he lived to express views like this today, Hocquenghem, who died in 1988, might be asked to attend a police station for questioning – no one is meant to raise questions about the disproportionate over-reactions and outright fabrications of the defenders of decency. Even so, as they were speaking then, before punitive progressiveness had reached total ascendancy, and since a record of their talk survives, they may yet inform us now about something our authorities would prefer us to remain deaf and blind to. Burning books containing pictures of illegal willies is perhaps not as effective as burning books with dissident arguments in them.
The discussion, presciently describing our present day structures of regulation and punishment, outlined the constitution of a new type of criminal: the type of criminal all ‘decent’ people would require protection from. This was the criminal who endangered the purity of the innocent, the vulnerable. Of course, ‘the child’ was the prototypical model of this category. From a criminology of acts, we began to have a criminology of types of person. Before the invention of this new typology, anyone could have committed a sodomitical act against anyone else – you were punished for what you did, not what some shrink said you were. But with the new typology, the basis of punitively protective, coercively caring law, your behaviour would now be construed as signposting your essential nature. Foucault, Hocquenghem and Danet noted that, previously, the law had not been particularly interested in the ages of sexual partners so long as no one complained. But the new typology brought with it a new notion – the idea of an ‘attack without violence’ (in French “attentat sans violence”).
The attack without violence was specifically constructed, in the new typology, around childhood. As Foucault notes, especially after Freud had demolished the myth of a presexual childhood, children were suddenly constructed as having a radically different category of sexuality. In fact, not only should children be protected from adult sexuality, but also from their own desires, especially if they found themselves developing a crush on an adult (God help adolescent school kids, who do this all the time). As Danet puts it, the new protectors would say,
“…yes, of course, children do have sexuality, we can’t go back to those old notions about children being pure and not knowing what sexuality is. But we psychologists or psychoanalysts or psychiatrists, or teachers, we know perfectly well that children’s sexuality is a specific sexuality, with its own forms, its own periods of maturation, its own highpoints, its specific drives, and its own latency period. This sexuality of the child is a territory with its own geography that the adult may not enter. It is virgin territory, sexual territory, of course, but territory that must preserve its virginity. … It could be that the child, with his own sexuality, may have desired that adult, he may even have consented, he may even have made the first moves. We may even agree that it was he who seduced the adult; but we specialists with our psychological knowledge know perfectly well that even the seducing child runs a risk, in every case, of being damaged or traumatised by the fact that he or she has had sexual dealings with an adult. Consequently, the child must be protected from his own desires …”
(Danet quoted in Kritzman, ed., pp. 276-275)
It is perhaps difficult for those who have absorbed these ideas fulsomely to question them, or even to acknowledge that they are not timeless truths but modern inventions. What is now perceived as an unbridgeable divide was once perceived as a simple continuum. Hocquenghem, who was involved from the age of fifteen in a sexual relationship with an adult without any of the allegedly inevitable pathological consequences, had this to say:
“What we are doing is constructing an entirely new type of criminal, a criminal so inconceivably horrible that his crime goes beyond any explanation, any victim. … In the case of attentat sans violence , (11) the crime in which the police have been unable to find anything, nothing at all, in that case the criminal is simply a criminal because he is a criminal, because he has those tastes. … The constitution (12) of this type of criminal, the constitution of this individual perverse enough to do a thing that hitherto had been done without anybody thinking it right to stick his nose into it, is an extremely grave step from a political point of view.” (Hocquenghem quoted in Kritzman, p278)
The creation of a new type of unutterably vile person, (13) as opposed to unutterably vile act, has had certain predictable consequences. As the discussants observed, a lawyer will be quite happy to defend someone accused of murdering ten old ladies. That wouldn’t bother him in the least: “But to defend someone who has touched some kid’s *bleep* for a second, that’s a real problem.”
Just thirty years later, you don’t have to be accused of actually touching a kid’s genital. You just have to be accused of looking at a picture of one. A new breed of vile pervert is born.
Heresy in the 21st Century
The contemporary terror and fraught fascination with paedophilia belies a profound instability, if not a kind of indefinability, in its juridical deployment. Currently, anyone from a muddled eighteen year old boy falling in sexual love with a fourteen or fifteen year old, to an unhappy middle-aged man seeking transient distraction from the insurmountable problems of his life by sitting in front of his computer screen and gazing at ‘under-age’ (14) images, to the tiny number of child abducting rapists and sexual murderers, all stand together as one after compulsory registration on the UK’s Sex Offender Register. The term ‘Sex Offender’ as it is used in most public discourse effectively erases all differentiations, violently categorising these diverse and heterogenous people into a spurious, imaginary unity.
The unmistakeably medieval vocabulary of heresy has had a long innings, lasting virtually unchanged for centuries, surviving in statutes and in religious faith, not to mention in the often unexamined background beliefs of many ordinary people. The war on heresy has been a long one, far longer than the war on terror, and it has resulted in immeasurable suffering and unquantifiable loss of life. It’s a word that is rarely used, at least in ordinary conversations, in the twenty-first century. It sounds twee, bigoted and old-fashioned, the sort of word, like ‘sodomite’, that came out of the mouths of reactionary old codgers in ermine and wigs, bashing their gavels dyspeptically upon their benches, in a bygone era. But I don’t think this means that it has gone. It is still very much with us, destroying lives, shattering families, tearing parents away from children.
It’s just that, recently, it has undergone a renovation: beliefs fashioned in ancient, pre-scientific and pre-democratic times can be opportunistically recycled for the digital age provided the vocabulary is modernised (and modernisation is all the rage these days). For fourteen centuries, men (and to a lesser extent, women) who were drawn to same-sex erotic intimacies were frequently branded as heretics or ‘sodomites’, and faced grotesque capital punishments as a result. (15) Mercifully, nearly a millennium and a half of hanging, mutilation and burning have come to and end. Today, you will no longer be sent to the gallows or the stake if you experience same-sex desires. But, whilst it may presently be fashionably ‘right on’ to be kind to gays and lesbians, we would be deluding ourselves in the extreme if we were to imagine that this new ‘tolerance’ amounts to fundamental ethical progress.
The hideous persecution of people practising same-gender sex in former times may seem, to many contemporaries of the early twenty-first century (in the Western capitalist democracies at least), to have been a horrific exercise in madness, as ludicrous as it was murderous. Former times often seem so weird, their fears so insanely irrational and ridiculous, that they appear to be quite incomprehensible in the modern world; just think of the panic over child masturbation that irrupted like wild fire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with batteries of expert pedagogues writing manuals and offering suggestions to worried parents on how to deter such abominable sinfulness in the young. (16)
Under the expert advice of the day, little girls and little boys had their hands and arms strapped to the sides of their beds each night, or were subject to intrusive and vigilant nocturnal surveillance, all in order to prevent them indulging in the evil affliction of self-abuse. Children of both sexes were repeatedly warned by fearful parents and pedagogues that not only would they degenerate into physical and mental invalids in this life, but hellfire and damnation awaited them in the next if they so much as placed a finger of their genitals, other than to void urine. In confronting these ludicrous beliefs now, we are tempted to shake our heads in horrified bemusement, and wonder what on earth drove the authorities of that era to leap on such preposterous bandwagons, investing such ruthless fanaticism in deterring what everyone now knows to be both universal and harmless (it really doesn’t make children go mad or deaf), and most assuredly no business of ‘the Authorities’ (or anyone else) anyway.
But we should pause before we congratulate ourselves too fulsomely on our greater enlightenment and toleration. As the British writer and literary theorist, Jonathan Dollimore, has brilliantly shown, what frequently appears superficially as a radical break with the past very often covertly sustains a radical continuity with ancient discourses. When these archaic discourses concern sexuality, it rapidly becomes evident that any real commitment to reason and rationality should readily consign their dominant contemporary interpretations to the historical graveyard of fanatical, hysterical and, ultimately, purely daft ideas.
Barbarism is usually considered, in much liberal thought anyway, as an anachronistic continuation of archaic cruelties. But I think this is part of the complacent self-idealisation and hubris which represents the present as an advance on the past, a contemporary ‘we’ who are so much more enlightened and wise than those prejudiced and superstitious folk of bygone centuries. My contention is rather different; the barbarism which counts – which, in order to preserve appearances, presently exports torture to less fastidious regimes, and which deposes democratically elected radical governments and installs bloodthirsty religious (or martial) maniacs as custodians of order - comes from the present, much more so than it derives from the past. And it appears today in the form of unacknowledged terrors and hatreds belonging to both Western liberals and reactionaries, both of whom see themselves as quintessential bastions of beleaguered civilisation.
The paranoid moralists of today are constantly on the lookout for pegs in ancient texts to hang their wholly modern hatreds on. Whatever meaning these texts might have had at the time of their origin has long been lost, or ignored; ancient discourses – ancient texts – are read through the lenses of modernity. In other words, the moralists of the contemporary moment select what they wish to hear from these obscure and distant tomes. (17) As Gore Vidal once observed, (18) the Old Testament Book of Leviticus has been used to great effect by the zealots of the religious right to hound and bash ... I have issues with my sexuality!
“What we inherit from the past, in the realm of sex, is the morality of patriarchs and clansmen, souped up with Christian hostility to the flesh (“our vile body”, Saint Paul called it), medieval chastity cults, virgin/whore complexes, and other detritus of ancient repression. Given these legacies of unequal moralism, nearly every civilized aspect of sexual morality has initially looked deviant, decadent, or sinful, including voluntary marriage, divorce, and nonreproductive sex.” (19)
In other words, the obscurity – and remoteness – of ancient systems of belief are being used to legitimise a thoroughly modern barbarity. As Dollimore drew out in an important essay of 2001, (20) it is undoubtedly true that the open expression of crude racism, misogyny and homophobia has become less and less possible, in certain important public contexts at least, in recent times. Legislation such as the notorious Section 28 of the 1988 Local Government Act, which prohibited the ‘promotion’ (i.e., discussion) of ‘the’ homosexual lifestyle by local authorities, especially schools, would be difficult if not impossible to get through parliament less than twenty years later. Similarly, the spiteful and bigoted resistance by a majority of politicians, Lords and neurotically sex-hating lobbyists, to the equalisation of the ‘age of consent’ for homosexual sex seems almost shocking today.
It would be churlish to imply that we should not applaud such developments; but it would be vacuously stupid to celebrate a new age of sexual enlightenment. Society’s self-appointed moral authorities have always tried to ensure that ‘morality’ means nothing other than the dreary, neurotic, petit-bourgeois aversion to sex (which paradoxically coexists with a fraught preoccupation with it). As the American philosopher, Richard Rorty, put it, debates about morality with these ground rules in place tend to ensure that gay-bashing is in, while abortion is out. (21) The British Marxist intellectual, Terry Eagleton, has been even more pointed: in this version of morality, immorality is always about what goes on in the bedroom, but never about what goes on in the boardroom. If large companies impoverish entire communities by closing down a factory in order to capitalise on cheaper labour costs in the ‘developing’ – i.e., more easily exploitable – world, this is just business as usual. But a single ‘inappropriate’ sex act, even an imaginary one, if it can be proved, will bring forth an incendiary moral maelstrom of brimstone and fire upon your house, whether you are a policeman, a doctor, a Naval Officer or a High Court Judge (all of whom are represented in the casualty list arising from the recent fanatical witch hunt masquerading as high morality – the UK police force’s Operation Ore). Neurotic moralism, in short, is obsessed with bawdiness, but curiously indifferent to bombing.
It is part of the contention being worked through in what follows that we might do well to jettison the ‘one size fits all’ moralism of our moral guardians, steeped in ancient bigotry and superstition as it is, and adopt what Michael Warner has called an ethic of sexual autonomy. Surely, Warner argues, it should be possible for people to enjoy sexual autonomy that is consistent with everyone else’s sexual autonomy. (22) We are, however, light years away from such sane sexual democracy.
Perhaps we need to explore not merely a history and sociology of the moralist sensibility, but a psychoanalysis. What goes on in the moralistic mind? Let’s address this in the next chapter.
(1) From her book of 1996, Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America Durham: Duke University Press, p3
(2) Terry Eagleton ‘Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching’ (Review of Richard Dawkins The God Delusion), London review of Books, 19th Oct0ber 2006.
(3) See Dan Gardner (2008) Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear, especially Chapters 3 (“Stone Age meets Information Age”) and 9 (“Crime and Perception”); London: Virgin Books Ltd.
(4) Judith Levine (2002) Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
(5) Densen-Gerber’s comments can be read in U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary, Sexual Exploitation of Children: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Crime, 95th Congress, first session, 1977, 42-28. Martin’s remarks to the same committee are in the same document, page 48. His comments to the Christian TV show were reproduced in the Bay Area Reporter, March 18, 1982, 8 (“‘Child Sex Cop’ Transferred”).
(6) Stephen Bruhm and Natasha Hurley, “Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children”, p. xxii, in Stephen Bruhm and Natasha Hurley, eds, Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota press, 2004
(7) I am taking the term ‘ideology’ to mean those dominant cultural stories prodigiously pumped out of our cultural factories with the aim of obscuring material injustices and inequalities. The function of these widely circulating stories is simple but, to the principal beneficiaries of the status quo, inordinately important: socially reproducing and sustaining existent power structures. These stories secure, or attempt to secure, the notion that ‘what is’ is not only as good as it gets, but also that it is ‘what ought to be’ and that - in the words of one their most artful and successful champions, Margaret Thatcher - ‘there is no alternative.’
(8) Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: The Will to KnowledgePenguin, 1976, p.101
(9) Quoted in an article in The Independent on 1st June 2007 “Police Chief: ‘Viewing’ paedophiles need not be jailed’
(10) A transcript of this discussion was published as “Sexual Morality and the Law” in Lawrence D. Kritzman (ed.) (1988) Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977 – 1984 New York and London: Routledge
(11) In other words, consensual, mutually pleasurable sex across the line separating the age of minority from the age of majority.
(12) Hocquenghem is referring to the ‘making up’, as opposed tot he essential make-up, of this type of person.
(13) As Foucault famously put it, in ancient civil or canonical codes, “heresy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more that the juridical subject of them. The nineteenth century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possible a mysterious physiology.” Foucault, 1976, ibid., p43
(14) From 2004, the age at which someone is legally categorised as a child – ‘under age’ as far as depictions of erotica are concerned -has increased to 18. Some militant child salvationist NGOs are lobbying the United Nations to increase the age still further to 25, on the grounds that some eighteen year olds look like younger teenagers, and will thereby release predatory paedophilic desires and intentions in those who view them (reference). Whilst these people are quite possibly certifiably insane, they are being indulged by politicians who desperately crave secure populist approval.
(15) Lewis Crompton’s encyclopaedic study, Homosexuality and Civilisation, chronicles this history of terror with chilling sobriety.
(16) The early eighteenth century tract Onania, for example, advises parents and children that masturbation “perverts and extinguishes nature; he who is guilty of it, is labouring at the destruction of his Kind, and in a manner strikes at the Creation itself.” Cited by Michael Warner, “The Ethics of Sexual Shame” in The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics and the Ethics of Queer Life New York: The Free Press, pp 3-4, 1999.
(17) For more intelligent readings of ancient and modern texts, which attempt to furnish insights into the material conditions in which such texts emerged, as well as how meanings other than the officially prescribed, dominant meanings can be gleaned, one could do worse than read Jonathan Dollimore’s impressive oeuvre, especially Sexual Dissidents: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault; Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture; Radical Tragedy; Sex, Literature and Censorship, as well as Alan Sinfield’s excellent Cultural Politics - Queer Reading London: Routledge, 1994, and Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Terry Eagleton provides a Marxian slant in his Sweet Tragedy; After Theory, and Holy Terror, although his whole work demonstrates the radical yield from ancient writings that can be harvested from a cultural materialist reading perspective. Each of these authors read from a cultural materialist point of view, although the first two inflect their reading lenses with insights gleaned from some aspects of contemporary queer theory and psychoanalysis. All demonstrate the value of appropriative, as opposed to denunciative or repudiative, readings. Sexual dissidents need all the intellectual resources history can furnish in order to resist over-mighty and violently coercive contemporary moralisms. As Eagleton has pointed out, radical dissidents and conservatives are both traditionalists, and their traditions have lengthy lineages; it’s just that radicals belong to a completely different tradition – of dissent and liberty – to the authoritarian possessiveness of cultural conservatives.
(18) Gore Vidal “Sex is Politics”, 1978, in Sexually Speaking
(19) Michael Warner, 1994, op cit., pp 5-6.
(20) “Sexual Disgust” in Jonathan Dollimore (2001) Sex, Literature and Censorship, Oxford and Cambridge: The Polity Press, in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
(21) Richard Rorty (1998) Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 New York, Melbourne and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
(22) Michael Warner, 1994, op cit.
Copyright © Inquisition 21st century
Go to Chapter 3.
Created on 04/10/2009 08:40 AM by Editor
Updated on 04/10/2009 08:59 AM by Editor
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