Menu
 |
 |
|
|
| Log In
|
|
|
|
|
| Search Web Pages
|
|
|
|
|
| Calendar
|
|
|
< September, 2010 >
| S |
M |
T |
W |
T |
F |
S |
| 29 |
30 |
31 |
01 |
02 |
03 |
04 |
| 05 |
06 |
07 |
08 |
09 |
10 |
11 |
| 12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
| 19 |
20 |
21 |
22 |
23 |
24 |
25 |
| 26 |
27 |
28 |
29 |
30 |
01 |
02 |
|
|
|
| Chapter 5.
|
|
|
Chapter 5. An Ethic of Sexual Autonomy: Toward Sane Sex.
“… even if rich Jews in the Germany of the early 1930s ‘really’ exploited German workers, seduced their daughters, dominated the popular press, and so on, Nazi anti-Semitism was still emphatically ‘untrue’, a pathological ideological condition. Why? What made it pathological was the disavowed libidinal investment into the figure of the Jew. The cause of all social antagonisms was projected into the figure of the ‘Jew’, the object of a perverted love-hatred, the spectral figure of mixed fascination and disgust.”
Slavoj Zizek (1)
“Man’s solidarity is founded upon rebellion, and rebellion can only be justified by this solidarity. We then have authority to say that any type of rebellion which claims the right to deny or destroy this solidarity simultaneously loses the right to be called rebellion and actually becomes an accomplice to murder.”
Albert Camus (2)
Preventative Murder (Lying in the Guise of Truth)
Even though our contemporary rulers have rediscovered a timeless formula (i.e., the best defence against truth is the constant repetition of lies, as the duplicity and bare-faced lying over the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 nakedly displays) it would be stretching credulity too far to suppose that everyone working for the State was a big fat liar, intent on deliberately misleading the people. There is, of course, a good deal of difference between deliberate mendacity and erroneous belief. But it is altogether less far-fetched to suggest that very large numbers of people can be persuaded to hold beliefs for which there are no rational justifications (and which do not serve their interests). Systems of economic and human exploitation have depended on this for their continued survival at least since the advent of democracy (before that, it didn’t matter whether you shared your ruler’s beliefs – you’d be summarily executed, or have your village torched, if you stepped visibly out of line).
How, though, may we determine whether a belief is erroneous, without claiming some spurious ‘God’s eye’ view or slipping into fuzzy relativism (everyone’s beliefs are all equally valid, simply reflecting their particular vantage points)? Without wishing to take a laborious detour through the entire history of philosophy, which has been struggling to answer this question for millennia, we might make a simple but rather profound observation: we tend to know whether a statement is true or not when it is made by one person about another. Or rather, we can, if we listen carefully, discern the contours of truth within the statement being made, the speech act itself, but it may have little to do with the expressed content (or, rather, the truth may be pertain to the expresser of the content – whenever A tells us a story about B, who we have never met, we are discovering nothing about B in reality, only A’s views and opinions about him or her). And if we listen carefully enough, perhaps with a psychoanalytically inclined ear, we will hear the whispering of the libidinal co-ordinates - the sources of unacknowledged, hidden sexual enjoyment - which structure the speaker’s preoccupations.
In the opening epigram to this chapter, Slavoj Zizek concisely explains why racism is always a pathological condition. I think it is worth staying with his thinking a little longer - he is addressing something highly pertinent to our concerns. In a stunningly brilliant analysis of the socio-political aftermath of a natural disaster, Zizek notes that, shortly after the impoverished, mainly black neighbourhoods of New Orleans were decimated by hurricane Katrina on 29th August 2005, reports emerged that the survivors were orchestrating outbreaks of looting and violence. Immediately, TV screens and newspapers were filled with reports of the disintegration of social order, explosions of black violence and rape. However, as with all previous paroxysms of moral panic and outrage, subsequent inquiries into these events revealed that, in the vast majority of cases, these orgies of primitive violence simply did not occur. As Zizek notes, unverified rumours were simply reported as facts by the media:
“For example, on 4 September Superintendent Compass of the New Orleans Police Department was quoted in the New York Times about conditions at the convention centre: ‘The tourists are walking around there, and as soon as these individuals see them, they’re being preyed upon. They are beating, they are raping them in the streets.’ In an interview two weeks later, he conceded that some of his most shocking statements turned out to be untrue: ‘We have no official reports to document any murder. Not one official report or sexual assault.’” (3)
The point that Zizek is making is that the most important feature of all these reports was the widespread willingness to believe them. As he argues, developing the analysis of anti-Semitism we have just read, even if ALL reports of violence and rape were to be proved factually true, the stories circulating about them would still be ‘pathological’ and racist,
“… since what motivated these stories was not facts, but racist prejudices, the satisfaction felt by those who would be able to say: ‘You see, blacks are really like that, violent barbarians under the thin layer of civilisation!’ In other words, we would be dealing with what one could call lying in the guise of truth: even if what I am saying is factually true, the motives that make me say it are false.” (4)
As you might by now have guessed, Zizek’s analysis directly parallels a related form of social scapegoating: for ‘Jew’ or ‘black’, substitute the signifier ‘paedo’. Vastly more virulently, this word represents ‘the object of a perverted love-hatred, the spectral figure of mixed fascination and disgust’ par excellence. To characterise all who find the beauty of the young erotically enchanting as toddler-abducting, murdering rapists is akin to characterising all who find women attractive as marauding Peter Sutcliffes (the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’). Eloquently intelligent lunatics like Catherine MacKinnon and the late Andrea Dworkin truly believed this: thankfully, most ordinary people, men and women alike, find this equation decidedly nutty. To take Zizek’s analysis seriously, the racist deployment of the signifiers ‘black’ and ‘Jew’ are simply shortcuts to placing our disavowed desires onto a speciously Othered entity. ‘Jew’, ‘black’, ‘homo’, ‘paedo’ – the very terms of mendacious truth, corrupt righteousness, violent virtuousness: they form a chronological sequence of lies aimed at gluing a fundamentally irreconcilable cluster of social ‘publics’ together into a fictional ‘us’.
Whenever we consider human speech and communication, we are inevitably considering what Zizek calls libidinal motivation – all the suppressed and hidden erotic investments we would rather other people not know about. Moreover, we are also ineluctably immersed in power and its deployment. Rarely does speech occur on a level playing field; more typically, it is staged along a gradient of power. If your cab driver says that he thinks you’re a pervert, you can shrug it off without any lasting effects (although the conversation you have just been having during your journey home from the railway station is a distinctly unusual one). But if a policeman says the same words – even though, so far as I’m aware, the sex police do not have especially lengthy trainings in psychoanalysis, philosophy, political history or anthropology to assist them in their diagnoses (rudimentary labelling seems to suffice) – the statement immediately has a real and material effect (5). When you are on the receiving end of it – when you are forced to assume the identity that is being thrust upon you and which violently erases everything else about you – you tend to know that you are being subject to a malignant and brutal lie.
The sex police believe that they have unearthed the real truth about you: all else (your professional achievements, your role as a good parent to your children, soul-mate to your partner, your personal kindness and generosity, etc) stands unmasked as a cunning deceit; in ‘truth’, you were a filthy pervert all along, and now you’re going to get your come-uppance (which, as we have seen, means social murder: if you succeed in pinning the most incendiary and socially despised signifier –‘paedo/sex offender’ - on another human being, you have consigned him to the realm of the living dead; in other words, you’ve effectively murdered him). And even if you have never done anything, ever, that is remotely unkind or exploitative to a ‘child’, you will be told that this is because the sex police have caught up with you before you could put your evil plans into practise. This is preventative, public-protecting, ‘pre-crime’ murder, legalised murder for the good of society.
Against Love and Decency
As is becoming rather predictable in this work, I can only approach the main subject, an ethic of sexual autonomy, via an apparent detour, which I hope the reader will eventually come to see as part of the journey. Before we can begin thinking about the possibilities for sane sex, we may be wise to take note of the principal features of our present regime of heavily policed sexual ‘decency’, which I think ought more properly to be called sexual paranoia. I mentioned earlier that the ethic animating these words is an essentially anti-loving, anti-community, anti-decency one. Perhaps now might be a good moment to expand on what might on the face of it sound like a rather mad, or at least recklessly anti-social, assertion. Without wishing to oversimplify the argument, it can be stated in reasonably clear terms.
Words like ‘love’, ‘community’ and ‘decency’ come to us from our cultural factories of representation with specific meanings already preassembled and encoded inside them. During production, they are stuffed with coercive ideological values: ‘love’ always seems to mean the petit-bourgeois, pleasure-smothering, denial of cumulative hatred, which we saw in Chapter Three can be a preciously healthy emotion when not subject to sentimental disavowal or displacement. ‘Community’ does not appear to include, say, revolutionary socialists or queers, and it seems to be laced with implacable vengefulness (offend speciously over-generalised ‘community standards’ in some way and you could well end up in prison). ‘Decency’ seems to mean, above all, the martial suppression of erotic exploration and experimentation, which it indiscriminately deems ‘indecent’ – a word which does not appear to include the bombing and butchering of thousands upon thousands of innocent Iraqi people during the War on Terror.
To put it differently, these words, which we use so effortlessly, so familiarly, also use us: they direct us, channel us, govern us, even when we are unaware of succumbing to their influence. Those who claim ownership of the signifiers ‘love’, ‘community’ and ‘decency’ do not want us to misuse their carefully manufactured products, which they effectively maintain a kind of unmandated copyright over. They rely on our failure to question deeply sedimented assumptions. They do not want us to discover new meanings, new possibilities, new liberties, by using these words in unauthorised ways. The natural order might be threatened if we were free to do this.
So, to state my seemingly insane refusal in more concise terms: the regime of sexual decency which dominates us all and which none of us ever elected is founded on such violent and impossible repressions and disavowals that all who submit to it will be forever haunted by everything they have excluded. But to maintain appearances, to fabricate an impossible and ridiculous notion of universal ‘decency’, which turns out to be as spiteful and narrow-minded as it is cruel and intolerant, our excluded desires will be bundled up by our factories of meaning, our ‘news’ media, our soaps and TV dramas, our movies, and presented to us as alien, as though they belonged to dangerous Others. It is this projection of disavowed desire onto an imaginary type of person which makes others into ‘Others’. And everyone knows that presently, now that homo-bashing is out of fashion, our favourite Others are paedos.
It should come as little surprise at this point in the argument for me to propose a speculative hypothesis: the protection of children has enabled moral reactionaries and privileged victimologists (who have largely felt victimised only by their own lack of victimisation or hardship or trauma) to manipulate a pre-existing form of good-hearted solidarity – there are very few people who believe that cruelty to children is a good thing - in order to impose a rigid, miserly, erotophobic moralism on everyone. In so doing, they are resurrecting ancient, pre-democratic (and pre-scientific) prejudices: for ‘abuse’ read ‘sin.’ And, as we have seen, in a powerfully orthodox strand of our Christian-inflected civilisation at least, ‘sin’ frequently means simply ‘pleasure’ (St Paul referred to ‘our vile body’).
If sex is indecently demeaning and dehumanising, does the fact that everyone is sexual make us all less human? From the perspective of compulsory decency, if you find yourself privately excited by the contours of a breast or a penis, you are failing to respect the whole person that these anatomical parts are attached to. But if most of us find ourselves contingently noticing such anatomical attributes, does this not universalize ‘indecency’ far more than it does its binary opposite?
Children, of course, are not being protected in any realistic way by this campaign of moralistic fascism; only a vacuous abstraction is (6). It is a protection of decency campaign. As we saw in the previous chapter, aggressive prohibition is always a double-edged sword, inciting transgression every bit as much as it suppresses and cows. Here is Associate Professor Amy Adler of New York University School of Law:
“Child pornography law, and the culture in which it has grown, allow us an occasion to reconsider some basic assumptions … - questions about the relationship between prohibition and desire, between censorship and speech, between law and culture. Censorship law does not only react to cultural trends. It also reflects, amplifies, and creates them.
In our present culture of child abuse, is child pornography law the solution or the problem? My answer is that it is both. This reading pictures law and culture as unwitting partners. Both keep the sexualised child before us. Children and sex become inextricably interlinked, all while we proclaim the child’s innocence. The sexuality prohibited becomes the sexuality produced.” (7)
I think the ‘unwitting’ partnership Adler refers to can only be regarded as an unfortunate accident if we exclude the factor of unconscious motivation: those libidinal investments we looked at earlier which shape our preoccupations. Despite the complicity Adler describes between victimologist law and the sexuality it inevitably produces, victimology has nonetheless crept insidiously into so many professional trainings and academic disciplines over a few decades to such an extent that it constitutes a pervasive new orthodoxy, an orthodoxy which abjures academic freedom in favour of silencing criticism and demanding that the party line be toed without dissent. It might be enlightening to consider how it began.
Zero-tolerance: The Rise of the Feminist Classroom
“Take away freedom of speech, and the creative faculties dry up.”
George Orwell (8)
In 1984, Orwell’s casualty of murderous political correctness writes in his journal: “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” In a characteristically brilliant appraisal of Orwell’s novel, Richard Rorty has this to say about Winston’s apparently simple and bald statement:
“All that matters is that if you believe it, you can say it without getting hurt. In other words, what matters is your ability to talk to other people about what seems to you true, not what is in fact true. If we take care of freedom, truth will take care of itself.” (9)
As an admirer (though not a disciple) of Rorty, I was struck by these words when I came across them again whilst researching this chapter. It seems to me that victim feminism has been corrosively effective in shutting down the freedom of thought Orwell and Rorty so urgently and plagently advocated, perhaps nowhere more successfully than in the academic world. And as the academic world feeds the real world with its professional elites in the police force, the legal profession, NGOs, charities, mainstream political parties, and so on, the consequences are rather more pervasive than a handful of awkward seminars. Here, again, in her powerful book of 1994, is Christine Hoff Sommers, a sane and distinguished veteran of equality feminism, citing one of the countless examples of what came to pass as academic debate following the rise of victim feminism in academia. During a packed workshop called “White Male Hostility in the Feminist Classroom” led by two female assistant professors from the State University of Plattsburgh, someone noted that female students can usually be relied upon to keep male students in check:
“One woman got a big laugh when she told of a feminist student who silenced an ‘obnoxious male’ by screaming ‘Shut up, you *bleep*er!’ “(10)
A few decades ago, the expression of opposing views in seminars was regarded as a good thing, feeding debate and discussion. What victim feminists refer to as male obnoxiousness used to be thought of as legitimate counterargument, to be treated seriously and dealt with by counterargument. Sommers believed that the growth of the (victim) feminist classroom did little to prepare students to cope in the world of work; I think she underestimated how successful the victim feminists would be in extending their appropriation of the university classroom to the workplace. However, her outrage at the victim feminist revolution remains as true today as when she exposed it in the early 1990s:
“It is an embarrassing scandal that, in the name of feminism, young women in our colleges and universities are taking courses in feminist classrooms that subject them to a lot of bad prose, psychobabble, and ‘new age’ nonsense. What has real feminism got to do with sitting around in circles and talking about our feelings on menstruation? … While male students are off studying such ‘vertical’ subjects as engineering and biology, women in feminist classrooms are sitting around being ‘safe’ and’honouring feelings.”(11)
Hoff’s forensic analysis persuasively shows that victim feminist pedagogy, in spite of its pseudo-radical posturing, simply plays into hoary old sexist stereotypes that extol women’s capacity for intuition, emotion, and empathy ‘while denigrating their capacity to think objectively and systematically in the way men can’. (12) Whereas an earlier ‘equality feminism’ welcomed solidarity with men who found blatant unfairness objectionable, the new victim feminists have discarded the careful multi-disciplinary analysis of systems of exploitation in favour of a vituperative, sloganeering ideology of nasty men being beastly to innocent women. As such, it has been spectacularly divisive.
A University of Minnesota social science professor told Sommers, on condition that his anonymity would be ensured:
We have a hardened and embittered core of radical feminists. These women have been victorious in court: they have the ear of several of the powerful regents and administrators. They call the shots. Everywhere you look there are feminist faculty members concerned to divest departments of their white male viewpoint. If you question this, you are labelled a sexist. It is a nightmare. At faculty meetings we have learned to speak in code: you say things that alert other faculty members that you do not agree with the radical feminists, but you say nothing that could bring a charge of gender insensitivity. People are out for control and power. (13)
This anonymous academic puts his finger on a signal detail: those who claim to be overthrowing an oppressive patriarchal power in favour of a new age of enlightened politeness are deploying strategies of power and terror that would bring an approving nod from Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler. Confusing intimidated conformity with respect, they take brow-beaten silence as an endorsement of their aims.
When Professor of Humanities Camille Paglia gave a lecture in 1992 at Brown University (USA) in which she dared to dispute victim feminism’s insistence that rape was paradigmatic of relations between men and women, she witnessed the feminist student’s debating abilities first hand. Believing that victim feminism was seriously over-emphasising rape, converting it into the crime of crimes, overshadowing all the wars, massacres, and disasters of world history, she insisted that the victimologist obsession with rape as the symbol of male-female relations was irrational and delusional. Paglia considered the new elasticity favoured by victimologists in the definition of rape as a trivialisation of real sexual assault, which she believed should be confined to cases of either stranger rape or the forcible intrusion of sex into a non-sexual context. Victim feminists, of course, had become accustomed to feeling raped when someone looked at them in a way they found offensive, or disagreed with them in seminars, or used ‘obnoxious’ (humorous) language in their presence. Paglia’s lecture produced tumult and fury amongst the feminist students; they ‘debated’ Paglia by screaming abuse at her and disrupting the lecture. Here is her account:
“Those who doubt the existence of political correctness have never seen the ruthless Red Guards in action, as I have done on campus after campus. For twenty years, meaningful debate of controversial issues of sex or race was silenced by overt or covert intimidation.
“As I watched a half-dozen pampered, white middle-class girls, their smooth, plump cheeks contorted with rage, shriek at me about rape, I had two thoughts. First, America is failing its young women; these are infantile personalities, emotionally and intellectually undeveloped. Second, it’s not rape they’re screaming about. Rape is simply a symbol of the horrors and mysteries of the body, which their education never deals with or even acknowledges. It was a Blakean epiphany: I suddenly saw the fear and despair of the lost, stripped of their old beliefs but with nothing solid to replace them. Feminism had constructed a spectral sexual hell that these girls inhabited; it was their entire cultural world, a godless new religion of fury and fanaticism.” (14)
So much for the freedom to say what you believe without getting hurt. Whilst British universities have remained less open to wholesale takeover by the new puritans, less willing to replace education with indoctrination, they have been far from immune, in certain significant areas at least (try taking a degree in social work, for example). Insofar as this resistance to fanaticism has been upheld, it is to be applauded. But the victimologist genie has already been let out of the bottle in the USA and it has been travelling across international boundaries ever since with the unhinged zeal of a fanatical missionary. Janet Halley, Professor of Law at Harvard University has suggested that victim feminism (which she calls ‘paranoid structuralism’) has spread so deeply into all of the institutions that structure our lives that it ought to be called ‘Governance Feminism.’ She writes:
“If you look around the United States, Canada, the European Union, the human rights establishment, even the World Bank, you see plenty of places where feminism, far from operating underground, is running things. Sex harassment, child sexual abuse, pornography, sexual violence, anti-prostitution and anti-trafficking regimes, prosecutable marital rape, rape shield rules: these feminist projects have moved off the street and into the state. …
“It would be a mistake to think that governance issues only from that combination of courts, legislatures, and police which constitutes the everyday image of ‘the state’. Employers, schools, health care institutions, and a whole range of entities, often formally ‘private’, govern too – and feminism has substantial parts of them under its control. Just think of the tremendous effort that U.S. employers and schools must devote to the regulation of sexual conduct at work, through sexual harassment policies that have produced a sexual harassment bureaucracy with its own cadre of professionals and its own legal character. And many feminist policy campaigns take power in the form of ideological shifts within state and nonstate entities … Consider, as a possible example, that one result of feminist rape activism is the elevation of child sexual abuse as a serious enforcement priority complete with ‘zero tolerance’ enforcement attitudes; other kinds of child neglect and abuse, other kinds of adult/child interpersonal violence, lack the charisma of sexual offenses. They fall into the background. And this is an effect of governance feminism.”(15)
Halley, a life-long feminist before her decision to part company with its contemporary advocates of victimhood, does not directly challenge the misanthropic effects of victim feminism’s infiltration into virtually every area of public life in the Western world in this sequence. Her book is more academic than polemical, although she concedes that she finds the new governance feminism schoolmarmish and priggish. However, it is clear that campaigns based on advocacy research, shrill propaganda and the censorship of open debate have led to a massive cultural obsession with child sexual abuse, despite the fact that it is nowhere near as pervasive, nor as destructive, as the other forms of child neglect and abuse Halley mentions in passing.
Outside the Feminist Classroom
The philosopher Ian Hacking, whilst in no way attempting to condone or excuse child abuse, conducted a thorough review of the published work on its prevalence which led him to these perceptive observations:
“Any given study seems to prove a lot, but when put together, they are so at odds with each other that the net effect is inconclusive. All these studies, of sexual or physical abuse, are amazingly indifferent to social class.” (16)
Hacking refers to Barbara Nelson’s classic study of the way in which physical abuse and neglect of children entered the American political arena: from the outset, Nelson noted, despite glaring material correlations, the campaigners were at pains to separate the problem of injured children from any social issues, a tactic which converted the problem into one of moral degeneracy (17). The approach ensured political unanimity, enabling liberals and conservatives to agree that child abuse was not connected with social division and poverty: it was a kind of moral illness. All could puff up their chests and make grandstanding exhortations to further their careers on the backs of impoverished and mistreated children. Moral indignation, of course, is cheap. It has no budgetary implications, no radical anti-poverty initiatives; all it takes is hot air and voluble outrage (delivering moral sermons to the lower orders has done little to alleviate poverty). Nonetheless, Hacking repeatedly found in the literature a highly replicated correlation between child abuse and neglect and poverty and low income (18). Hacking refers to an article that appeared in the September 1990 issue of the British Times Literary Supplement , which noted that, despite its ability to evoke horror, child sexual abuse (or physical battering) harms, indeed kills, far fewer children, either in Great Britain or the United States, than simple, miserable and unremitting poverty. The TLS article raised the question of why, with poverty intensifying and welfare programmes being run down, our attention had been drawn to sexual or other abuse? Hacking suggests a plausible reply:
“In [my] view part of the answer is that child abuse and especially sexual abuse offer scapegoats. It is clear that the children who die from maltreatment are the poor ones. In the United States the availability of public funds for poor families with small children decreased substantially every year during the 1980s, while every year there was more and more talk about the horrors of child abuse. In 1990 a presidential panel announced that child abuse was a ‘national emergency’. … But the panel’s focus elided unpleasant topics like the filth, danger, the stench of urine in the halls, broken elevators, smashed glass, curtailed food programmes, guns.” (19)
In Britain, child psychiatrist Danya Glaser conducted a scholarly and meticulous review of the literature covering the effects of child abuse and neglect on the developing brain (20). Glaser concludes that the evidence is overwhelming that the politically deprivileged varieties of child mistreatment, which usually begin in infancy and continue chronically thereafter - cumulative neglect, capricious and chaotic love/hate oscillations in parental behaviour, coldness and physical cruelty - are strongly predictive of subsequent mental health difficulties, significantly impairing the neurobiological development of the brain. Buried in her lengthy paper is the observation that these problems are vastly more pathogenic than discrete episodes of sexual abuse are, especially where the latter happen in a context of loving and secure parent-child relations. Glaser, like Hacking, is of course absolutely not condoning sexual abuse; I think that we can read her paper, however, as an invitation to ask why we are so obsessed with it.
Our preoccupation with child sexual abuse appears to be more connected with an irrational fascination, fanned and fuelled by the propagandists of victimology, than with far more common and damaging issues affecting vastly more children; in other words, real children’s actual well-being is more likely to be sacrificed for the sake of our addiction to sex stories (abuse porn). In a remark which we might now find deeply perturbing, Halley continues:
“Ask any group of U.S. Women’s Studies majors what they intend to do with their degree: many will say that they intend to ‘work in an NGO’. Global governance and local governance are often done through informal, opaque, ideologically committed ‘nongovernmental organisations’ that strategize hard, sometimes successfully, to become indispensable when major new fluidities in formal power emerge. … By positing themselves as experts on women, sexuality, motherhood, and so on, feminists walk the halls of power.” (21)
In a saner world, we might question any claim to expertise founded on silencing free debate and using state power to threaten, sack, incarcerate and permanently stigmatise those who either dissent or simply differ. Despite her calm, sober tone, Halley’s writing amounts to an urgent and alarming call for everyone, especially women, to ‘take a break’ from victim feminism, which, in becoming overweeningly powerful, has inaugurated a new age of abhorrently illiberal legislation, paranoid misanthropy and frankly Stalinist censorship.
The Strange Case of the Paedophile Psychologists
Imagine you are a respected and experienced social scientist and academic. You and a team of colleagues become intrigued by a phenomenon which appears to have been researched, virtually without exception, through the lenses of a particular moral ideology rather than through the basic principles of scientific enquiry: the sexual experiences of minors. Contrary to the spirit of the times, which appears to require compulsory panic and disgust, you decide to take a cool, balanced look at the published social and psychological literature claiming to substantiate firm correlations between childhood sexual experience and subsequent psychopathology. You rigorously analyse no less than 59 studies, in the spirit of scientific scepticism rather than moral revulsion. A few months after your research findings are published, after scrupulous critical review by your scientific peers of course, in a prestigious scientific journal, you find that a prominent radio personality begins a campaign of vilification against you which culminates in your work being unanimously condemned in the House of Congress (for the purposes of this example, you are a US scientist, although it is almost certain that an identical reaction would ensue were you based in the UK).
Huge damage is done to your reputation; you are accused of being an apologist for paedophilia, of using deeply inadequate means of analysis, of selecting flawed and unrepresentative studies and of being morally twisted. A little later, after the media crescendo dies down, you are scientifically, though not publicly, exonerated: there is nothing remotely unscientific or erroneous in your study – all of the co-called criticisms, without exception, were baseless, misinformed, highly unscientific and excessively emotive. Predictably, however, the media outlets, populist celebrities and scientifically ignorant politicians responsible for condemning you are not in the slightest bit interested in retracting their inaccurate, hysterical and at times completely false allegations against you.
This is not a story I have concocted in order to besmirch grandstanding politicians, those venal little tin-pots who will seize on the smallest morsel of potential outrage like slavering wolves in order to further their careers, or to ridicule witch-hunting moral fascists, who perhaps ought to be pitied for finding themselves permanently surrounded by so much unspeakable filth. It is a lamentably true story of witch-hunting moral fascists and grandstanding politicians attempting to undermine scientific enquiry in the name of straitlaced, mean-spirited chauvinism and po-faced political bigotry (22). I find it intriguing because it illustrates rather compellingly the common ideological roots of both right-wing moral fascism and ostensibly left-wing politically correct victim-feminism. The fact that they have been sharing the same, increasingly fetid and unaired, bed together for a few decades should alert us to the fact they share identical presuppositions in sexual ideology. Sex is bad, and sex with penises, especially erect penises in sexual orifices, is unspeakable: it is rape and victimisation and corruption and evil.
But to return to our story of condemned scientists: the politically motivated, media-endorsed and scientifically ignorant hate campaign I have just referred to is precisely what happened to psychologists Bruce Rind, Phillip Tromovitch and Robert Bauserman when their study was published in perhaps the most prestigious of the American Psychological Association’s journals, the Psychological Bulletin in 1998 (23).
Why so much bile and venom? You guessed it: the researchers were dissenting from the received folk-wisdom surrounding sexual experiences in childhood. The wrath of the righteous was drawn by the researchers’ finding that the term ‘child sexual abuse’ was being used in an unhelpfully undiscriminating way, and that consensual sexual experiences between adults and minors resulted in no discernable ill effects for the children involved. The presumed psychological correlates of ‘child sexual abuse’, the researchers found, were actually more associated with parental cruelty, coldness, emotional indifference, violence and scapegoating – highly ‘dysfunctional’ parental attributes. When sex was forced or inveigled upon a child in these conditions, severe, long-term mental health problems were indeed probable; but the latter were inextricably bound up with the whole range of abusive parental behaviours and to isolate sex as the sole cause was unjustified.
This was incendiary enough for victimologists and moral fascists, but it was Rind et al’s next finding which ensured immediate and raging moral combustion: where sex occurred consensually, not the ‘informed’ consent of victimologists, where every liaison has to be countersigned in triplicate with a witness present before business can begin, just simple, mutual, pleasure, there were no detectable ill-effects; often the opposite was true. If a sexual incident was not experienced as abusive either at the time of its occurrence or subsequently, it seemed somewhat meaningless to refer to it as ‘abuse’ at all. Rind et al, under advise from the journal’s editorial board, distinguished between child sexual abuse, those cruel, forceful, violent incidents in which a child was coerced into a sexual act they neither wanted or enjoyed, and the more neutral term ‘adult-child sex’, in which a minor, often a teenager, took part consensually in a sex act that they found pleasurable with someone older than themselves (often, an older teenager).
The authors were not blind to the potentially controversial quality of their research; in their original paper, they were at pains to distance themselves from those who would use their findings to ‘morally disreputable’ ends. They wrote:
“..it is important to consider implications of the current review for moral and legal positions on CSA [Child Sexual Abuse]. If it is true that wrongfulness in sexual matters does not imply harmfulness … then it is also true that lack of harmfulness does not imply lack of wrongfulness. Moral codes of a society with respect to sexual behaviour need not be, and often have not been, based on consideration of psychological harmfulness, or health … In this sense, the findings of the current review do not imply that moral or legal definitions of or views on behaviors currently classified as CSA should be abandoned or even altered.” (24)
Whilst it is always easy to claim wisdom with the benefit of hindsight, I think Rind, Tromovitch and Bauserman were wrong to concede moral co-ordinates to fascist/victimologist bigots and hysterics. Such caution and restraint did nothing to spare them from the eruption of violent, ignorant spew which flooded over them. Whilst I do not wish to oversimplify the dense ramifications of competing ethical paradigms, I cannot help but wonder what might happen if wrongfulness and harmfulness were to find their long but deeply neurotic and unhappy marriage annulled in the court of reason (25). As we saw earlier, Freud abjured and deplored the intrusion of moralistic preconceptions into the scientific study of human sexual variation. In the twenty-first century, thanks largely to the now entrenched coalition between victimologist paranoia and moral fascism, we are light years behind his measured, intelligent analysis of 1905. If something is ‘wrongful’, especially if it is harmlessly so, we perhaps ought to asking ‘wrongful to whom, to what?’ It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, if persons are not being harmed, perhaps a coercive moral ideology is.
A few years later, after their scientific exoneration, the researchers were in a more defiant mood. We saw in Chapter Two how ideologues managed to persuade a populist media to share their obsession with paedo-monsters, and how they began to manufacture spurious and wholly fictional statistics about the ‘epidemic’ of child sexual exploitation they deludedly believed in and wished to persuade everyone else to share. The fact that all of their claims were subsequently shown to be wholly imaginary, reflections of nothing more than their own repudiated fantasies, projected onto viable imaginary social scapegoats, has not deterred them from advancing their cause. Rind, Bauserman and Tromovitch, in one of several robust defences of their original analysis, described their awareness that, from 1984, sensational claims of satanic ritual abuse in day-care centres for pre-school children proliferated in the United States:
“Staff workers were accused of such things as assaulting four-year-olds with swords and curling irons, forcing them in ritualistic style to consume faeces and drink the blood of sacrificed babies, and molesting them in outer space or on ships at sea surrounded by sharks trained to prevent them from escaping. Meanwhile, by the late 1980s, a billion-dollar recovered-memory movement had developed, and diagnoses of multiple personality disorder (MPD) mushroomed. All over the country, women were entering therapy with vague complaints such as feeling unhappy without knowing why, then emerging with ‘recovered memories’ of bizarre childhood victimization – sometimes for many years, even decades, without ‘remembering’. Often, these women were led to believe that this purported victimization had fragmented their personalities into a dozen, a hundred, or even a thousand alters.” (26)
The researchers’ suspicions had been aroused by the horror-laden descriptions offered by the victimologists of the consequences of child sexual ‘abuse’, a term which they had stretched to include non-contact episodes (e.g., flashing), sex between children of different ages, and episodes of mature adolescents willingly participating in sex with older teens or adults. In victimology-land, all were seen as horrifyingly traumatizing; dramatic analogies were routinely used by the Salvationists, such as slavery, head-on car crashes, being mauled by a dog, and torture, in order to convey their belief about the nature of any and all childhood sexual experience. The research team wrote:
“But sex, in general, is not like being mauled by a dog or torture, which are always painful and traumatic. Sex is often just the opposite – the most pleasurable experience one can have. It therefore cannot be assumed a priori that a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old, for example, will react with trauma rather than pleasure just because his or her partner is older. In fact, teens of this age often do not react as orthodoxy insists they must … (27)”
Rind and his associates go on to describe how, eventually, scientific sceptics began questioning the stories coming from day-care cases and therapist’s offices, although not before unquantifiable harm had been done to those accused by these ‘victims’. The sceptics provided empirical evidence showing how even bizarre memories can be implanted, how children can be manipulated and coerced into telling preposterous stories, how people can be induced to believe that they have thousands of ‘personalities’. As Rind and his colleagues noted, day-care cases ceased, convictions were overturned and some of the more egregious practitioners of MPD therapy were successfully sued for malpractice. However, an immeasurable amount of irreparable damage and distress had been inflicted on wholly blameless people before the lunacy was stopped.
An Ethic of Sexual Autonomy (Sane Sex)
Having expended a good deal of time on sexual lunacy, it might now be a good moment to refer back to what Michael Warner has called an ethic of sexual autonomy (“surely”, he writes, “it should be possible to live a sexual life that is compatible with every else’s sexual life.”) This is a simple statement, yet it holds potentially revolutionary potential. Of course, one should expect victim feminists, policemen and judges to savage it, caricature and cartoon it, just as Bollas warned in his typology of fascism. Those who have built not only lucrative personal careers but institutions and structures of power on their benighted ideology of obligatory anodyne decency are not likely to relinquish their privileges to reasoned argument.
Nonetheless, we ought perhaps to be free to wonder whether what passes presently as a universal sexual morality is not in reality a form of violent and sadistic immorality. If sexual morality means controlling the sex of other people, rather than living ethically with one’s own sexual principles, it is by definition a dishonest, scapegoating and profoundly immoral enterprise. A more humane and capacious sexual morality, far from shaming people into suicide, or locking gentle, non-violent men up with violent rapists and psychopaths, ought perhaps to be about fighting the corrosive, debilitating and murderous effects of organised sexual shame. We would do well to drop our paranoid and deluded belief in organised paedophile rings and turn our scrutiny instead onto the truly organised and State-funded shaming rings. The shaming rings have created a class of pseudo-paedos – often intelligent, valuable, highly educated people - who will be deprived of everything they have ever achieved, wholly sacrificed in effect, in order to carry the stigma of a social hallucination. Rather than have you question the ideological forces which have created this psychotic mirage, paedo-hunters demand more and more shame, more and more social murder. An ethic of sexual autonomy would radically refuse this.
An ethic of sexual autonomy would not be blind to the ‘dignity’ argument. Presently, if you have your picture taken below the age of eighteen, with too much flesh on show, especially if genital flesh is on display, your dignity is being destroyed, even if you consented to the picture. For your own good, for the maintenance of moral order, anyone who looks at an image of your flesh will have to be eliminated. Dignity, it seems, from this perspective, depends on a belief in the absence of sexual desire. Like its twin, decency, dignity can only be conferred on those who don’t get involuntary stiffies or tingling clits. Upright *bleep*s and appetitive growlers are indecent and undignified. Once upon a time, a relatively sane hypocrisy conditioned this mad public posturing: of course we all get unexpected (and expected) erotic thrills; but we’ll just not mention these and pretend that we are all deeply committed to procreative reproduction only, family values and all that, and that we spend the rest of our time collecting stamps and listening to the wireless. We all know this isn’t true, but for the sake of decency and dignity, we’ll turn a blind eye, so that the system can keep ticking over. Militant victimologists, however, have blown this compensatory hypocrisy to smithereens. Decency and dignity, for the victimologist Red Guard, are true and real and literal. If you secretly have indecent fantasies, you must be exposed and punished.
Decency might mean other things: it might mean altruism, empathy, and solidarity with the socially vilified. Christ would recognise this version of decency, although He would, I think, abjure scapegoating and self-aggrandising sadistic righteousness. Similarly, dignity might mean more than sexual constipation and neurotic lying (“what, me, get an erection inappropriately, to an inappropriate image? Never!” – as the judge said to the condemned offender). Michael Warner writes:
“Dignity has at least two radically different meanings in our culture. One is ancient, closely related to honor, and fundamentally an ethic of rank. It is historically a value of nobility. It requires soap. (Real estate doesn’t hurt, either.) The other is modern and democratic. Dignity in the later sense is not pomp and distinction; it is inherent in the human. You can’t, in a way, not have it. At worst, others can simply fail to recognize your dignity. These two notions of dignity have opposite implications for sex. The most common judgements about sex assign dignity to some kinds (married, heterosexual, private, loving), as long as they are out of sight, while all other kinds of sex are no more dignified than defecating in public, and possibly less so. That kind of dignity we might call bourgeois propriety. In what I am calling queer culture, however, there is no truck with bourgeois propriety. If sex is a kind of indignity, then we’re all in it together. And the paradoxical result is that only when this indignity of sex is spread around the room, leaving no one out, and in fact binding people together, that it begins to resemble the dignity of the human. In order to be consistent, we would have to talk about dignity in shame.” (28)
‘If sex is a kind of indignity, we’re all in it together’: it is a phrase which invites repetition because it is so massively denied by the dominant culture. Tony Duvert, in a scintillating, scabrously eloquent, sanely enraged polemic written in response to a nauseatingly normalising and reactionary ‘sex education’ encyclopaedia designed for the young (compiled in the early 1970s and masquerading as liberal enlightenment – lying in the guise of truth again) found himself challenging the predominant ideological authorities of his time – medical sexologists. Today, these white-coated experts have given way to thrusting prosecution lawyers and NGO victimologists, who presume to know how everyone should be living their erotic lives. With this succession in mind, and with apologies for his uncompromising language, he is worth quoting at the height of his fury, railing against those who see themselves as experts on sex. Sarcastically marvelling at the fact that humanity was able to live for such a long time, to prosper, reproduce, invent, rule, be cheerful sometimes, when there was no sexology (or, we may now add, victimology) to teach it the right path to happiness, he writes:
“It’s true that our ancestors were ‘unbalanced’: they *bleep*ed in every kind of position, wore their hair long, fornicated without hiding it, sucked and ass-*bleep*ed each other, walked on bellies to cause abortion, had orgasms far and wide, without consideration for age and sex … Nature’s aberrations, which bourgeois society has rectified: years ago, the Puritans of America demanded that domestic animals – dogs or horses – wear boxer shorts in public to hide their private parts .. “ (29)
It is hardly humorous to note that our new Puritans – Child Victimologists – are the contemporary advocates of not only boxer shorts but child-sized burkhas. Duvert is perhaps the most eloquent exponent of unpoliced erotic pleasure I have come across – he was enraged by the presumptions of the more earnest bourgeois moralists of his day, with their preposterous belief that the constipated, dreary, joyless version of sexual morality they embraced was as good as it could possibly get. For Duvert, erotic pleasure was possible only when it was freed from the tyranny of productivity, a freedom which children have to have actively uneducated out of them. Growing up in an erotophobic world, for Duvert, meant that great violence had to be meted out on children’s pleasurable polyvalence – an idle, unproductive potential which must be coerced and bullied out of them into conventional unhappiness. And free pleasure absolutely could not take place if a policeman, social worker, judge and bishop were peering over your shoulder instructing you on what was ‘appropriate.’
If your ‘ethical’ position is that all that counts is your own enjoyment, you cannot be practising an ethic of sexual autonomy. Simple, mutual, uncoerced reciprocity is all that is required, but it is required. You must not encroach on the sexual autonomy of another, but that’s the only prohibition: in other words, your sexual autonomy must be consistent with everyone else’s. This seems to me an infinitely less violent and ruinous formulation than present day ‘age of consent’ laws, which insist that, no matter how horny you are, you absolutely must not have any form of sexual intimacy with anyone else until you have passed your eighteenth birthday. Whenever a section of society presumes itself to have the authority and wisdom to regulate the sexual expression of others, great violence will inevitably result. An ethic of sexual autonomy would require the repeal of many sexual ‘offences’, leaving only demonstrable coercion, violence or the unwanted intrusion of sex into a non-sexual situation on the books.
We have, perhaps, only begun to wonder about what sane sex might be like in this chapter. If sane sex is so remote, so difficult to achieve, if we have allowed fascist and puritanical demagogues to re-write the statute book, we need to ask “What makes us so credulous? Why are we so willing to believe the most lunatic rumours about sex and children?” If the moralists argue that sex is intrinsically demeaning, I would argue that it has not been ‘de-meaned’ enough, by which I mean disentangled from the plethora of coercive hysterical injunctions which have been glued to it. Maybe this should be our next exploration: how we might de-mean sex and ‘childhood’ from fascist tyranny.
Notes and References to Chapter Five
(1) Slavoj Zizek (2008) Violence: Six Sideways Reflections pp 84 – 85, London: Profile Books Ltd
(2) Albert Camus (1953/2008) The Fastidious Assassins, p 20, London: Penguin Books (Great Ideas Series)
(3) Slavoj Zizek, op cit., pp 83 – 84.
(4) Slavoj Zizek, op cit., p 84.
(5) Advanced knowledge of computer technology, which the police undoubtedly hold, is of a radically different nature to advanced knowledge of the complex, ambiguous and essentially enigmatic relationships between human motivation, fantasy and behaviour. Computer hard drives are not the same as minds and it is, frankly, madness to assume that they are, or even to assume that it is possible to read off causal links between what appears in a computer cache and its owner’s behaviour or intentions. It is a wholly unjustifiable extrapolation to assume that if some who abduct and molest children have ‘indecent’ images in their possession, this somehow constitutes proof that all who possess such images are molesters. If a serial killer happens to be a general medical practitioner, we would not be justified in assuming that all GPs are serial killers.
(6), Kathleen S. Williams (2004) “Child Pornography Law? Does it Protect Children?” Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law 26(3) 2004: pp 245 -261.
Williams argues that the decision to focus on private possession rather than production and distribution, with the attendant shift to categorising the content of images, including pseudo- images, which involve no children only computer generated depictions, was motivated principally by moral revulsion – i.e., the need to uphold moral standards - and not by the desire to protect children. As the location and prosecution of manufacturers is altogether more complicated and, with the present state of technology, far harder to execute, one might note in passing that prosecution lawyers were given a guarantee of prosperity when the focus of legal annihilation shifted away from producers to people who looked at pictures in the privacy of their homes. As many of the images are decades old, the ‘children’ sought so avidly by salvationists for protection may well be near to, if not actually, drawing their pensions today.
(7) Amy Adler (2001) “The Perverse Law of Child Pornography” Columbia Law Review, March 2001
(8) George Orwell An Age Like This, 1920-1940 v. 1: The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell , Vol. I, p. 7, Boston, Massachusetts: David R. Godine; Reprint edition (26 April 2007)
(9) Richard Rorty (1989) Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 176, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press
(10) Christine Hoff Sommers (1994) Who Stole Feminism: How Women Have Betrayed Women p.92, New York: Touchstone
(11) ibid., pp 90 - 91
(12) ibid., p 91
(13) ibid., p 113
(14) Camille Paglia “No Law in the Arena: a Pagan Theory of Sexuality” in Camille Paglia (1994) Vamps and Tramps p. 30, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd.
(15) Janet Halley (2006) Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism, pp 20 – 21, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
(16) Ian Hacking (1995) Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory, p. 64, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press
(17) Nelson, Barbara (1984) Making an Issue of Child Abuse: Political Agenda setting for Social Problems Chicago: Chicago University Press
(18) Hacking (1995), op cit., p. 65
(19) Hacking (1995), op cit., p. 65
(20) Danya Glaser (2000) “Child Abuse and Neglect and the Brain – A Review” Vol. 41, pp. 97 – 116, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.
(21) Halley, 2006, op. cit., p 21.
(22) An informative and unsensational account of this lamentable episode is given by Professor Scott Lilienfeld, a social scientist at Emory University, USA. See Scott O. Lilienfeld (2002) “When Worlds Collide: Social Science, Politics, and the Rind et al. (1998) Child Sexual Abuse Meta-Analysis” Vol. 57, No. 3, pp 176 – 188, American Psychologist
(23) Rind., B., Tromovitch, P., & Bauserman, R. (1998) “A meta-analytic examination of assumed properties of child sexual abuse using college samples” Psychological Bulletin Vol. 124, pp 22 – 53.
(24) Rind, et al, (1998) op cit, p. 47
(25) Ian Hacking describes the contours of this dispute – utilitarian ethics (based on the measured consequences of particular actions) and deontological ethics (an intuitionist view, based on deep-seated beliefs concerning an action’s wrongfulness, irrespective of its consequences). See Hacking, 1995, op cit.
(26) Bruce Rind, Robert Bauserman and Philip Tromovitch (2000) “The Condemned meta-Analysis on Child Sexual Abuse: Good Science and Long-Overdue Skepticism” pp 68 – 72, July/August, Skeptical Inquirer
(27) Bruce Rind, Robert Bauserman and Philip Tromovitch (2000) “The Condemned meta-Analysis on Child Sexual Abuse: Good Science and Long-Overdue Skepticism” p 69, July/August, Skeptical Inquirer
(28) Michael Warner (1998) The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics and the Ethics of Queer Life, p 36, New York: The Free Press
(29) Tony Duvert (1974/2007) Good Sex: Illustrated, 2007 version translated by Bruce Benderson, p. 80, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series
Copyright © Inquisition 21st century
Go to Chapter 6.
Created on 04/10/2009 08:44 AM by Editor
Updated on 04/10/2009 09:01 AM by Editor
|
|
|
|
|
