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Difference is not the same thing as 'diversity.' On the contrary, our discourse of 'diversity' is a means of deploying the appearance of difference to serve ideological conformity. 'Diversity' means alterity-made-acceptable. It means an acceptance of purely cosmetic differences that pose no threat to the 'hegemonic' order. Colourful costumes and spicy dishes are welcome; the deep questioning of the liberal nation state, secularism, and consumer capitalism are not. (I will not engage with the question of whether our culture really demands "equality of outcome" - the bald fact that we inhabit one of the most grossly unequal societies in all of human history should answer this claim.) As so often, I think the liberals are partly correct. The acceptance of difference is indeed the mark of moral wisdom and political pragmatism. But, as ever, the professed pieties of the liberals belie their coercive practices. Liberal capitalists want different-looking people to serve their ideological purposes; what they do not want is the demand of actually having to manage the perplexing problem of human difference. Boy-perverts and girl-perverts are caught on the wrong side of this great division: we represent the great unassimilable Other. And, as I have elsewhere suggested, this is a fine and honourable place to be. The identitarians among us would like kiddy-fiddling to become just another acceptable form of sexual diversity, approved by our benign sexual culture of compulsory self-indulgence along with all the other perversions that have already recieved the epicurean imprimatur. I am, as always, appalled by the idea - though my nightmares centre not on any kind of paternalistic state telling us what we may do, but rather on the horror of an hedonistic culture insisting that we must, at all costs, take the enjoyment that is our due. How fortunate we are that we boy-perverts (and, more importantly, our young friends) are for the moment spared such barbarities. |