pedophilia maximus
Music: The Eternal Afflict: (Luninographic) Agony
Because I spend a majority of both my work and play time on these Tubes, I do not watch much television. What I do watch---in the morning, for the most part, and occasionally in the evening---are court TV shows (I LOVE Divorce Court), an episode of Wife Swap here and there, and a lot of tabloid news programs (e.g., 60 Minutes, which is my favorite; morning "news" shows, last night I was apparently lucid enough to watch Nightline, and so on). In the past two years every last news program has moved over to the tabloitainment model. Sure, CBS's 60 Minutes is hanging on to "hardness"---though I give them maybe three years before they succumb to Gresham's Law too.
Because I do not have cable, it's hard for me to make a strong, personalized case for my bloggish generalizations about tabloid news, although in hotels on trips I do catch the MSNBC, Fox, and CNN programs a few times a year, so I think it's safer to say this based on what I've seen: there has been a obsessive explosion of news programs about the defloration of children. In a recent column in the Los Angeles Times by Rosa Brooks, the author agrees with my assessment:
The arrest of former schoolteacher John Mark Karr in the slaying of child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey launched a flurry of excited stories about pedophiles, child abduction and murder. The cable news stations could hardly hide their glee, and even the New York Times joined in.
I cannot remember a tabloid program that I have watched (or listened to as I surfed the Tubes) that did not mention something about a pedophile. NBC's morning show Today as well as Dateline have had an ongoing, sting operation luring unsuspecting youth ministers into suburban homes with the promise of pre-teen blow jobs. On the local news last night, the lead story was not recovery from Katrina (as it should be), but that a local teacher has been accused of child molestation. Before that, a few months ago the scandal was about an art teacher who posed nude for her lover's website (she was fired, then exonerated). Nightline was a story about a 40-something man who adopted a "Russian Child Sex Slave." All last year stories about naughty school teachers paraded across our screens. Next to the vague and difficult to spot "terrorist," the exogenous threat of our time is most definitely the pedophile.
What's going here? From what I know about television programming, there must be spikes in viewership numbers to merit such "coverage." The "glee" Brooks identifies is surely the glee of increased ratings. But what is the overall libidinal investment fueling this frenzy of the pedophilic spectacular? Brooks' answer is compelling, but wrong:
In our hyper-commercialized consumerist society, there's virtually no escaping the relentless sexualization of younger and younger children. My 26-month-old daughter didn't emerge from the womb clamoring for a seashell bikini like Princess Ariel's — but now that she's savvy enough to notice who's prancing around on her pull-ups, she wants in on the bikini thing. . . . In a culture in which the sexualization of childhood is big business . . . is it any wonder that pedophiles feel emboldened to claim that they shouldn't be ostracized for wanting sex with children? . . . if we want to get to the heart of the problem, we should obsess a little less about whether the neighbor down the block is a dangerous pedophile---and we should worry a whole lot more about good old-fashioned American capitalism, which is busy serving our children up to pedophiles on a corporate platter.
On the one-hand, she is right: the machine behind the libidinal investment in this pedophilic phantastic is capitalism---media conglomerates going "automatic for the people," apparently giving us what we want. Ratings are the reason for the tabloid coverage of scintillating sexualized scandal. But we should not claim this is the result of the "relentless sexualization of children." Oh no no no: it's quite the opposite---or rather, it’s the opposite first.
(And one has to ask: what is wrong with a tot in a bikini? Absolutely nothing.)
The psychoanalytic and anthropological notion of the incest taboo, it seems to me, helps to provide a more robust explanation, in addition to the business of sexualizing youngsters: it only seems like children are sexualized precisely because they are robbed of their essential, sexual natures in the marketing of "innocence." All human beings are sexual creatures; they come out of the womb capable of experiencing pleasure, their entire body being one, undifferentiated erogenous zone. When they are cognitively complex enough to differentiate bodily zones all babies want to do is eat, shit, and touch themselves. It is the introduction of language---the source of the "no!"---that suddenly the forbidden begins to work on the pleasures of transgression. "Don't touch that or it will fall off," as it were, makes masturbation all the more tantalizing. Sorry you Foucauldians, but the "repressive hypothesis" explains a lot here.
What else attracts a pedophile to a child? It is almost wholly symbolic: the notion that sexualizing a child is transgressive and naughty. The media stories about pedophiles, child pornography, and so forth are inherently pedophilic, tapping into the same libidinal excitations that get pedophiles off. Of course, the way in which this pleasure is experienced is very different, but the point is that the source of enjoyment (jouissance) is the same.
In this sense, then, we need to see the sexualization of children in a more dialectical way: yes, Brooks is right that children are being sexualized, but it is always under the directive of desexualization. Only when a human is de-sexed is there the desire to "sex them up." It's a "both/and" thing, but in the last instance, it's the imposition of innocence: don't touch that! Getting to the root of the problem requires our letting our children be the sexual creatures they are, and to quit this stupid, nostalgic imposition of the genital-less, cherubic state. The more we insist that children are not sexual, or deny them their sexual exploration, and so on (precisely the underlying premise of the television profiles of pedophiles), the worse these transgressions (and television exposes) are going to get.
If the television screen is a prophetic test site for the big screen, I would put money on next years "thrillers": expect more films about pedophiles in the next couple of years. Trust me: you can bet on it.