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	The End of Pedophilia Chic By Rod Dreher Beliefnet December 17, 2009 http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/2009/12/the-end-of-pedophilia-chic.html Thirteen years ago, Mary Eberstadt caused a huge dust-up with an essay in which she described (and denounced) "pedophilia chic" -- the idea, growing among "enlightened" circles, that sex with young people might not be such a bad thing at all. Among the (then-contemporary) high profile examples she cites is a Vanity Fair profile of Lane Bateman, a posh private school teacher who was sentenced to prison for trafficking in kiddie porn, having been ratted out by a male grifter he'd molested when the boy was a student. The piece paints the porny pederast as a victim -- of the grifter, of homophobia, and of outdated moral codes. Eberstadt writes: In case the reader misses the point [that Bateman , Bateman is also provided an opportunity to expound on it himself. "Bateman says he purchased the material that ultimately brought him down several years before he started teaching at Exeter, when he was coming out of the closet and wanted to make up for lost time. 'For a few years, you could buy anything, and I bought some films and books that featured young boys,' he says. 'For me, these pictures were aesthetic, not pornographic. I know people say, these images are despicable--how can you think that? But the key point is that I identified with the boys, not the men. If someone young had grabbed me when I was that age and said, "Let me teach you something," I would have said, 'Sure.'" And here, as with the example of Calvin Klein, we come to the real heart of pedophilia chic: It's about boys. It is boys and boys alone who are seen as fair sexual game. For if Bateman's cache of child pornography had featured little girls, rather than little boys, it is unthinkable that he would have become the object of a sympathetic profile in the likes of Vanity Fair. That a teacher whose sexual tastes run to boys rather than girls could come to command a cultural dispensation for that preference--this, rather than the "legacy of the closet," would seem to be the "deeper meaning" of the scandal at Exeter. She also recalls a piece from two years later in, of all places, The New Republic, in which Hanna Rosin sympathetically reviewed a documentary about NAMBLA members. Eberstadt writes: Next, Rosin praises NAMBLA's "bravery." "After all," she writes, "it is still heresy even to consider the possibility of the legitimacy of their feelings." Today's pedophiles, she reminds us, live in especially unfriendly times. Politically, things could hardly be worse; witness the tough language on child pornography in the Contract with America. Even President Clinton, she notes sarcastically, "was cowed into taking a courageous stand against 'softness on child pornography.'" Yet NAMBLA, despite it all, continues pluckily on: "keeping all their activities above board"--even publishing their New York phone number. Just as the grownups of NAMBLA turn out to be more innocent than one might expect, the boys, for their part, seem to be far more sophisticated. As Rosin reasons, "it might even be that a budding young stud had the upper hand over the aging, overweight loner." And how old does a boy have to be, in the Rosin/ NAMBLA view, to qualify for "budding young stud" status? Sixteen? Fourteen? Twelve? No? Well, how about ten? A few years later, Rosin, by then a mother, in a Slate article slightly backtracked on that TNR piece, in an essay condemning a prominent academic who had written a book arguing in part that kids are more harmed by right-wing parents wanting to protect them from sex than by sexuality itself. From Rosin's Slate essay: Levine also shrugs about kiddie porn, calling it just a matter of "a small number of people who might do nothing more harmful to minors than sit around and masturbate to pictures of ten year olds in bathing suits." I suppose if you define "harmful" as necessitating a live victim, that's technically true. But there's something disturbing about letting go of our natural revulsion to such an image, as Levine seems to have done. The anti-kiddie porn laws may have a whiff of "thought crime," but they, along with a heap of societal scorn, have succeeded so far in keeping the cache of kiddie porn minuscule. Levine also defends ephebophiles, people who are attracted not to children but to teen-agers. Statutory-rape laws encode the outdated and sexist idea that a woman's virginity must be protected for her father's sake and that she herself can never desire on her own, Levine argues. But these days teen-age girls seek out sex with adults for their own reasons, like a wish to feel protected or adventurous. Levine cites the example of 21-year-old Dylan and 13-year-old Heather, whose parents cruelly reported Dylan to the police and got a restraining order against him. Heather kept writing him lovey-dovey notes, and eventually Dylan whisked her away in his Jeep Wrangler on a cross-country ride, where they stayed in motels, watched movies, and ate Indian food. The FBI pronounced him armed and dangerous and launched a manhunt that made all the front pages. Levine is incensed with the FBI and the media for portraying Dylan as "dark and evil" and with Heather's parents for turning him in. But I imagine that most parents would also have called 911. Dylan reportedly had a restraining order filed against him by one of the two mothers of his children, and he had once offered to pay two teen-age girls for sex. Perhaps it's misleading to call his relationship with Heather rape; maybe the legal term should be fine-tuned to predator, or just lech. But as parent of a daughter, I'm happy to have the law on my side. Most of the book is devoted to Levine's proposed solution, and here she enters the realm of comedy. The right, she argues, has won the sex-education war, so most of what children learn in school these days is some form of abstinence. Sex is shown to be either clinical, all uterus and wiggling zygotes, or dangerous. "Aids, guilt, herpes, disappointment, syphilis, loneliness, cervical cancer" are the words she plucks from a Christian sex-ed pamphlet. What we need, she argues, is pleasure education, sex-ed classes devoted to the erotic. Here Levine is backed up by dozens of sexologists with "helpful" suggestions. Children in school should learn about orgasms, masturbation, and the "sophisticated aspects of lovemaking"; otherwise they will "stumble through mediocre sex until they stumble on some other source of erotic enlightenment." This book, Judith Levine's "Harmful to Minors," came out in 2002, when the country was only a few months into the horror of the Catholic scandal. Imagine a respectable publisher today touching that kind of material with a 10-foot pole. It's hard for me to. That's progress. And that's the point of Eberstadt's new First Things essay. Now, writes Eberstadt, the unitary reaction of the American left and right against the rapist Roman Polanski signals that pedophilia chic has probably ended (at least outside of Hollywood, which rallied to the old pervert's defense). The reason, according to Eberstadt? The Catholic sex abuse scandal, which made it impossible for decent people to deny the hideous damage adult sexual exploitation of kids does. Excerpt: It prospectively cast all those enlightened people into a new role as defenders of the young and innocent. In other words, it logically created a whole new class of anti-pederasts. And since the Church's harshest critics are, generally speaking, the same sort of enlightened folks from whom pedophilia chic had floated up, there lurked in all of this a contradiction. After all, one could either point to the grave moral wrong of what the offending priests had done-- or one could minimize the suffering of the victims, as apologists for pedophilia had been doing before the scandals broke. But one could not plausibly do both any more, at least not in public. And so, in a way that could not have been predicted, but that is obviously all to the good, the priest scandals made it impossible to take that kinder, gentler look at the question of sex with youngsters that some salonistes of a few years back had been venturing. Reading all of this today reminded me of something I find particularly disturbing about the GLSEN reading list I blogged about recently. From the excerpts online, a consistent them emerges: that pre-pubescent and adolescent sexual experiences, even with older adults, are not necessarily harmful, but even pleasurable and useful in helping create an identity: pederast narratives as Bildungsroman. Eberstadt writes about how prominent and widely respected gay novelists and writers, men (and they are always men) like Edmund White and the late Paul Monette, write openly about how sexual relations with child lovers is either a positive part of the gay male experience, or at worst something we should not judge. Excerpt below the jump: Pedophilia, White asserts at the outset of this discussion, is "the most controversial issue" in the lives of many in the gay movement. It is also, the reader is led to understand, a terribly complicated subject. As one gay man--ostensibly not himself a pedophile--puts it in words that the author quotes approvingly, "There's no way to answer it [the issue of pedophilia] without exploring it. We need information and time for deliberation. There are no clear answers--who would provide them?" White is willing to try. "Those who oppose pedophilia," he posits, "argue that the "consent" or seeming cooperation of an eight-year-old is meaningless. " On the other hand, "those who defend pedophilia reply that children are capable, from infancy on, of showing reluctance." Similarly, "critics of pedophilia contend that children are easily manipulated by adults--through threats, through actual force, through verbal coercion, through money." Here again, the other side is allowed the last--and longest--word: "Champions of pedophilia (and many other people) argue that children are already exploited by adults in our society--they are bullied by their parents, kept in financial and legal subjugation, frequently battered. And they have little legal recourse in attempting to escape punitive adults. . . . They can't vote, they can't drink, they can't run away, they can't enter certain movie theaters, they can't refuse to go to school, they can't disobey curfew laws--and they can't determine their own sexual needs and preferences. Pedophiles find it ironic that our society should be so worked up over the issue of sexual exploitation of children and so unconcerned with all other (and possibly more damaging) forms of exploitation. If anything, the pedophiles argue, sex may be the one way in which children can win serious consideration from adults and function with them on an equal plane; if a child is your lover, you will treat him with respect. [emphasis added]" And where does our narrator locate himself between these camps? "I am not in the business of recommending guidelines for sex with youngsters," he writes coyly, for "I simply haven't gathered enough information about the various issues involved." At the same time, though--or so the author insists--"the question of sex with children remains"; and White makes a final attempt to get to the bottom of it by interviewing an actual pedophile in a bar in Boston. This man, the author coolly reports, "has a lover of twelve (he met him when the boy was six)." Far from the voracious predator so feared by the general public, however, our pedophile could scarcely appear more ethereal. He is "thirty-six, dressed in faded denims, his face as innocent and mournful as Petrouchka's. His voice was breathy and light, his manner anxious and almost humble." Lest there be any last doubt of this man's suitability for polite company, White erases it with the ultimate compliment. "I was," he writes candidly, "strongly attracted to him." There follows a conversation in which the amorous adventures of White's pedophile are fondly recounted. White asks how the man met his present "lover, " and the pedophile replies: "At the beach. He was there with his mother. He came over to me and started talking. You see, the kids must make all the moves." In case that point has been missed, White reiterates it a few lines later, this time asking explicitly: "Did your friend take the sexual initiative with you?" "Absolutely," Petrouchka affirms, adding, "I've been into kids since I was twenty-two, and in every case the kids were the aggressors." "What do you two do in bed?" White next inquires. There follows a graphic description, which the pedophile concludes on a mournful note. For there is, as it turns out here, at least one problem with man-boy love that most readers may not have anticipated: namely, that the kids are too loving. " My last lover," the pedophile explains, "told me that he didn't like getting f--d. 'Why didn't you tell me?' I asked. 'Because you liked it so much--I wanted to please you.' That's the problem; kids want to please you." A second writer who has explicitly addressed the matter of men and boys, this time adolescents, is Larry Kramer, author of the hugely celebrated AIDS play "The Normal Heart" and of an earlier novel called "Faggots" (1978), one of the classics of the postliberation gay genre. The comparison between Kramer and White is particularly useful insofar as the two authors differ markedly in a number of important ways. Kramer's authorial perspective, as well as his political persona (he is a well-known activist and co-founder of the New York Gay Men's Health Crisis), have made him something of an anomaly in his chosen circles. Between the 1970s and the dawn of AIDS, at a time when most gay figures were proclaiming the joys of post-Stonewall "liberation," Kramer, for his part, was nearly alone in emphasizing its dark side. "Faggots," for example--a controversial book then and now concerns the plight of a man looking for homosexual love in the hedonistic heyday of Manhattan and Fire Island. Kramer includes a number of scenes in which older men drug, flatter, and seduce teenage boys. Most prominent among these is a 16-year-old named Timmy, who is initiated into the high life at a party by a series of experienced men and finally "devoured" by ten at one time. In the course of this brutal description--one of several in the book involving adolescent boys--Kramer repeatedly invokes the appeal of Timmy's "beauty," his "teenage skin," his status as "forbidden fruit." One by one, the men at the party succumb to Timmy's charms, including even the most macho of them all ("the Winston Man"), who finds himself "excited in a way that he has not been since" high school. Timmy's fate in the course of the book, it should be added, is not a happy one. Is Kramer implying that such is the price paid for decadence, or is there tacit empathy in his depictions of Timmy's many would-be "fathers"? It is left to the reader to guess. Much less ambiguous, at any rate, is the role played by Timmy and other "youngsters" in the world that "Faggots" portrays. Another celebrated gay author who broached the subject of sex with minors is the late Paul Monette. Monette's 1988 book "Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir" garnered a National Book Critics Circle Award nomination and was acclaimed by many as "one of the most eloquent works to come out of the AIDS epidemic" (USA Today). His 1992 book "Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story" won the National Book Award. It is in this volume that Monette, like Edmund White before him, puts forth what would once have been a controversial thesis about the sexual wants of prepubescent boys. "Nine is not too young to feel the tribal call," he notes early on while recollecting his own childhood adventures with a boy his age. "Nine and a half is old enough," he repeats later, adding the by-now familiar note that "for me at least, it was a victory of innocence over a world of oppression." Several chapters later, while reminiscing about an aborted affair he had with a high-school student while teaching at a boarding school, Monette sounds another theme that once would have been guaranteed to shock: that of the predatory, empowered adolescent. "Behind the gritted teeth of passion," writes the author of his first sexual encounter with a particular boy, "I heard the ripple of laughter, so one of us must have been having fun. Must've been Greg, for I was too busy feeding on sin and death to play." "It was Greg who always chose the time," he continues, adding dramatically, "I stood ready to drop whatever I was doing. . . . I lived in thrall to Greg's unpredictable needs." That is not to say that Monette, at the time, felt himself relieved of responsibility for the affair--far from it. "If I am particular about the fact of being seduced--putting it all on him, the will and the dare and then the control--it doesn't mean I didn't feel the guilt. . . . I had become the thing the heteros secretly believe about everyone gay--a predator, a recruiter, an indoctrinator of boys into acts of darkness." But this self-recrimination, he goes on to reveal, was simply false consciousness. For finally, "I don't think that now. Twenty years of listening to gay men recount their own adolescent seductions of older guys has put it all in a different light." Eberstadt cites gay writer Bruce Bawer approvingly, saying that he has spoken out against this normalization of pederasty among gay male circles. Still, bringing all this to mind with regard to the GLSEN reading list, it raises the question: if grown men remember sexual encounters as children with fondness, appreciation and nostalgia, are they not disordered, and yes, perverted? In other words, the fact of not being disgusted by one's own sexual encounters in childhood, especially with adults, means that something is broken inside you. Not your fault, of course; you were in some real sense a victim. But you must not, whatever the cost, see what was done to you as normal and acceptable. To the extent that GLSEN and its supporters seek to make prepubescent sexual expression normal, or to in any way remove the taboo from it, they have to be exposed and resisted -- and certainly not rewarded with high-level appointments in the federal education bureaucracy, as the president has done with GLSEN founder Kevin Jennings. One more thing: back in 1990 or thereabouts, I went with a gay friend to see a film called "Rambling Rose," set in the 1930s. It was a social comedy. In one scene, the hapless hottie Rose (Laura Dern), seduces the boy in the household (he was 12 or 13, if memory serves), and initiates him into sex. It's played for comedy, which is how I took it. I'll never forget walking out of the theater, talking about that scene and how funny it was. My gay pal was not amused. "She raped that kid," he said gravely. "There was nothing funny about that." I feebly explained that the boy clearly had a good time, and that if he had been unwilling, the sex wouldn't have happened, given male physiology. Ted, my friend, wasn't having it: "That's what pedophiles say. If the adult had been a man and the kid had been a girl, you would have been as mad as I am." Ted was right. Remembering that conversation this morning, I'm thinking about my friend N., who was seduced, if that is the word, by a male pederast when he was 12 or so. The pederast was a pillar of his community. N. was a classic case: absent father, family living a hardscrabble life. He was the perfect mark for the pederast, who plied him with what he craved: nice things and the attention of an older male. This went on for eight years or so, into N.'s young adulthood, when he finally could no longer live with the guilt, and told somebody. His abuser is now in prison. N. has had a painful, messed-up life; he's consumed with guilt over his consent. He can't escape the fact that he agreed to do all those things that that older creep -- that he was not held down and raped, strictly speaking. Of course N. was a lonely and needy kid who was manipulated by an evil man, and shouldn't blame himself for what happened to him. But he does. I've watched him, a grown man, curled up on the floor sobbing over it. All that turned N. into an alcoholic, and he's had several run-ins with the law over his drinking. N. is not gay, but if he wrote a book about how sex with an older man ruined his life, I wonder if GLSEN would be interested in recommending it to kids as a cautionary tale. Actually, I don't wonder at all. The point should not be to deny that young people can and do have sexual feelings. That would be to deny reality. The point should be, and must be, that in a civilized society, strong boundaries are to be drawn around the expression of those feelings, particularly with older, sexually mature people -- and enforced. Though good grief, considering this poor guy's situation, would it kill us to use common sense?
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