Seeds of Our Demise, Part — oh, there are too many to count now
I do hope this is hysterical misreporting, because otherwise we’re in for a long session of me trying to convince myself that there are too many nice people I actually know who live in or near Hollywood, CA for me to anticipate with glee the Big One or the flaming asteroid or what-have-you disaster that will surely someday destroy Southern California. I don’t even want to quote anything for fear of attracting even more disgusting spam my way than I already get, so to make a long story short, apparently there’s this child actress, currently twelve years of age, who is going to be in a movie which supposedly contains several explicit scenes involving the s*xual abuse of the character this child is playing. As an added bonus viewers of the movie (which for humanity’s sake I hope will number even less than the people who went to the theater to see Powder) will be treated to some scenes of the girl, presumably at some point before, during, or after her ravishment, in her underwear.
Some commenters on the post above have offered the misguidedly earnest viewpoint that this is all to the good because “S*xual abuse should not be something swept under the rug or ignored.” Why yes, as we all know, s*xual abuse is never ever talked about by anyone ever in public or in the newspapers or on tv or on the internet because this society is so repressed and blind to its own faults. Why just the other day, Oprah herself stated on her latest show — before the segments on “How to Grow Perfect Roses,” “Absolutely Scrumptious Desserts You Can Prepare in Fifteen Minutes out of Sprite, Splenda, and Baking Soda,” and “Dinah Shore — a Retrospective of Her Life and Career” — that people who believed bad things could possibly happen to children in America were mean old traitors.
What sort of people could possibly question the wrongness of child s*xual abuse? I’ll tell you who — the only people who need to be told that it is in fact wrong and evil: pedophiles. Unfortunately, very few pedophiles seem to have the ability to accept the magnitude of their own crimes, as the rates of recidivism seem to bear out. And thus the very people who should be the focus of the shame-inducement of increasingly shrill and explicit depictions of s*xual abuse are the ones that will in fact be titillated and encouraged by the fact that their favorite pastime is now being depicted upon the screen and considered Oscar-fodder. And what in fact do we have here? Yes, another example of the misdirected energies of liberals, wasted on providing spurious “revelations” of evils no normal person disputes, while ignoring, or even encouraging, real evil.
There is far, far more of this stuff going around than gets reported, and therefore it is a Public Service to point an accusing finger at it. Besides, as we all know, victims are our true saints, and to the extent that we identify as many people as possible as victims, we sanctify our society.
The usual justification is that this sort of thing “promotes understanding,” or some such bushwa. What’s to understand? Some characters take liberties with young people, and ought to be locked away: end of story, roll the credits. No award potential, I guess.
Comment by CGHill - July 23, 2006 10:39 am
You forgot about the part, usually implied, about how our Christianity-inspired sexual repression is what causes so many people to become pedophiles.
Comment by andrea - July 23, 2006 10:52 am
Is that how that works? I must be as repressed as anyone on earth, given the absence of entries on my dance card, and yet it never occurs to me to take it out on some twelve-year-old. I must be insufficiently religious or something.
Comment by CGHill - July 23, 2006 12:44 pm
Child sexual abuse was invented in the 70s, I think ; Ian Hacking had an essay on the invention of child abuse, which after a decade or so becamse child sexual abuse, probably because it played better in the press.
Freud heard lots of stories of child sexual abuse from the then-grown adults, so many that he couldn’t believe it was true, and thought it was made up. But it wasn’t abuse in the popular imagination yet, in any case. Just weird.
A psychiatrist whose name I can’t remember found he couldn’t give a public lecture on it without running into hysterics about its investigation as an academic topic ; he claimed that “borderline'’ pedophiles in fact make great teachers (and possibly vice versa, self selection) because they can sustain an interest in children where normal adults “yeah whatever'’ out. So maybe that’s the reason for development in that direction having survival value. It’s just that it takes over everything.
Most women are basically child kidnappers anyway, approaching any infant with a sickly sweet smile at the checkout and contempating a snatch. Maybe the public reaction is a reaction against that direction in themselves.
aha
“The Making and Molding of Child Abuse'’ by Ian Hacking (Critical Inquiry v.17 n.2 p.253, Winter 1991) it must be in a book by now
_From the Wrong Side: A Paradoxical Approach of Psychology_ by Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig
The latter also has http://rhhardin1.home.mindspring.com/guggenbuhlcraig.txt that I copied out long ago. I seem to have lost the book.
Anyway they public reaction and appetite for child sexual abuse stories is as weird as anything. There’s whole news channels for it.
Comment by rhhardin - July 23, 2006 5:03 pm
Guess what, Ron. I’ve decided you are a sicko and am banning you from this blog. Can you guess why? Probably not.
Comment by andrea - July 23, 2006 9:54 pm
Hollywood is always pushing the envelope and appealing to the basest human impulses to sell movies. Calvin Klein dresses up 10 year old girls on billboards in a sexual manner to sell clothes. The Victoria’s Secret posters in the mall are soft porn. And it’s a big surprise it’s come to this?
Well, since child pornography is a crime, and possessing images depicting child abuse is a crime. Then as soon as this particular movie is released, the producers should be arrested for child porn, and the master of the movie confiscated as evidence.
Comment by Tony - July 24, 2006 10:06 am