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That's tricky. Pointing out the problem is easy; solving the riddle is hard. I don't believe I'm up to the task of excavating the structural causes of late-modern paedo-hatred, though I firmly believe they exist. And at the risk of wanting to seem like a better and more consistent Marxist than I really am, I do think think these ideological phenomena have their origins in material relationships, and the way to resist them is through political opposition to the structures that support them. So, in that spirit, a few tentative observations as a first step along the road: 1) I do not think that it is a coincidence that the radical change in attitudes toward minor-attraction occurred in Western nations at about the same time as a radical economic and political change came about at the end of the 1970s and early 1980s. The cultural changes that neoliberal ideology have produced are huge and far-reaching, and lie far beyond my ability to describe, but I think we can see the a shift in values that has infiltrated every aspect of social life, including attitudes to sex. In the UK, the major panics around child sex-abuse began in the Thatcher years, and it is notable that economic globalisation has brought with it Western attitudes to sex as well as attitudes towards money. Sex and economics are linked in curious ways. 2) Even the language we use to talk about sex (and about intergenerational sex in particular) bear a markedly economic stamp. Look at the way that discussions about permissible sex-acts assume a kind of contractual language: we now talk about 'informed consent', as though coitus were a sort of commercial enterprise which each party goes into on the expectation that their venture will bear substantial dividends. 3) Even more tellingly, I am fascinated by the language of 'exploitation' that surrounds adult-child sex in our late-capitalist culture. What is so fascinating about this sudden anxiety around 'child exploitation' is that exploitation is in so many ways the common currency of our culture: not that our capitalists are necessarily more rapacious than those of a former age, but there can be few cultures in history where the exploitation of others has been so unapologetically lauded as it has been in the West over the last few decades. (When Donald Trump congratulates himself on his own skill in manipulating the IRS, you know that we live in a culture in which the morality of the medieval fabliaux prevails). Isn't it strange then that we should be so anxious about the possibility that our sex lives might imitate our economic lives, with the powerful literally as well as metaphorically fucking the weak? (Many of the Gothick internet-based fantasies of paedophile plutocrats and politicians debauching innocent children encapsulate precisely this image). 4) And this is linked to anxieties about the meaning of equality. The word is so central to our political discourse, but in real terms of course the bedrock of our society is huge inequality. Even the political left now seems to accept that there is no remedy for the massive inequities that arise from post-industrial capitalism, and has shifted its focus to the more tractable politics of identity: rather than wanting men and women to be equal, it now merely wants women to be exactly as unequal as men. (The taming of radical feminism by capitalism is in my view one of the tragedies of the late twentieth century). And so the fears and anxieties that arise from living in a culture of exploitation find their outlet and their expression in identity politics, which looks for figures to blame rather than lasting solutions to the intractable problems of prejudice and division. Rather than being seen as something that is created and circulates through human actions and decisions, we talk about 'power' as something reified, that is in the hands of certain people and not in the hands of others. We have a politics on the left that is obsessed with the idea that the powerful exploit the powerless, but which has no commitment at all to anything so radical as admitting that the powerless might be capable of empowering themselves. Equality has therefore become a wholly theoretical concept, a matter of legal status and hypothetical rights that increasingly bears little resemblance to people's real lived experience. 5) And I think all this anxiety and pessimism about economic power and the self-serving nature of all human relations ultimately filters down to our idea of acceptable sexual relationships. There needs to be an equality of 'power' in such relationships - meaning an equality of age and status. In a sexual conjugation where each party is assumed to be engaged in the rational maximisation of his or her own pleasure, it is necessary for the combatants to be equally matched. (This is perhaps why same-sex couples have achieved such rapid and complete social acceptance - what could be a better picture of equality from the perspective of liberal identity-politics than two men or two women having sex?). 6) But children are excluded from entering into sexual contracts, because they are the most acceptable and inoffensive exemplification of powerlessness. They are powerless because they are not independent economic actors: they stand outside both the economic logic of capitalism (where agency rests in your powers of consumption) and the pseudo-egalitarian logic of liberalism (which paints them as powerless victims of adult agency). Children are therefore doubly excluded from the venture of sex, and - while some sex-play between same-age peers may be permitted - it is unthinkable that an adult could be permitted to have sex with a child. 7) That, I think, is ultimately what is unspeakably abhorrent about adult-child sex; it breaks a taboo that our society clings to because it manifests much too graphically the repressed violence and coercion upon which all late-capitalist economies are ultimately founded. It is the stuff of nightmares. |