Customer Reviews

Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting

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1 star:		(4)

 

 

Back in the 1950s, Leslie Fiedler stunned America with his thesis that the great American novels were homoerotic love stories: Huck and Jim in "Huckleberry Finn," Ishmael and Queequeg in "Moby Dick," etc. He seemed correct as well as sensational, and American writing since Fiedler's magnum opus "Love and Death in the America Novel" and his jarring essay "Come Back to the Raft again Huck Honey" has only buttressed his point.

James Kinkaid has made an even bolder claim a half-century later, that pedophile fantasy can be found at the heart of our most revered movies like "The Good Ship Lollipop" or "Home Alone." "Our culture has enthusiastically sexualized the child while denying just as enthusiatically that it was doing any such thing," he writes, capsulizing his argument. I think this claim in intuitively true. A lot of films show kids in their underwear gratuitously and use the ambivalence of art to insinuate what taboo dictates cannot be directly stated. Macaulay Culkin in the "Home Alone" movies is a beautiful blonde with unnatural cherry-red lips like Harlowe or Monroe!

But the conclusions Kinkaid draws from his observations aren't as forceful and eloquent as the debunking observations themselves. If he is right, what does this mean? His answer seems to be kind of vague. He suggests we rewrite the Gothic script and stop overrating innocence and panicking about the burgeoning sexuality of the young. His pervasive humor throughout the book suggests a kind a campy scholarship. I am all for humor, but I think Kinkaid needs to write another book about how our society can get out of the quandary of its sexual hypocrisy. It's a larger and more complex subject than he seems to think. Also, he chooses his pictures poorly, and I think they're essential to making his points about the eroticized child.

I hope these misgivings don't steer you away from "Erotic Innocence" though. Its a totally fresh perspective, and how many books deliver that anymore? Read it as the opening slavo of what I'm predicting will be a long 21st century battle between the prigs and the libertarians.

Kincaid begins from the premise that our culture's stories are flexible, and reflect our underlying cosmologies. He demonstrates convincingly that myths about childhood innocence and concurrent vulnerability arose historically as we created a separate cultural identity for children. This stoked a quasi-erotic love of children as innocents, and a hatred of those who act out that eroticism. There is a widespread obsession with children, and an obsession with those who act on that societally generated eroticism. Those who are inclined to hate have fostered a bitter hatred of those who are trapped by the wrong kind of love of children. Dahmers and Gacys are rare and twisted individuals, but they are held up by these haters as representatives of all who break the rules for touching and loving children. Kincaid shows, though, that society dotes on cute, eroticized children, as long as appropriate hypocrisies are maintained. He suggests that the frenzied hatred of child-abusers is fed by this same hypocritical eroticism. Up to this point, Kincaid is bold and persuasive. Children themselves become damaged by the myth, being taught that be be desired or contacted erotically by an adult is to become the most damaged of society's victims, and even potential abusers themselves, and that any love expressed in these relationships, perhaps by the only adult who has shown them love, is absolutely thereby discounted. The truth is that "hard-core" sexual contact with children is a harmful and abusive practice, and only the most blind or self-serving can deny this. Kincaid does not attempt to deny this, although he questions its frequency. Kincaid challenges all of us to find ways to reconcile the awareness of this cold harm with our "warm" behaviors in the unmapped areas of love. The book fails however in developing effective and compelling alternative stories. The tortuous paradigm he describes throughout the book exists, besides serving a "pleasure-principle motive", as a societal adaptation to prevent a shift into the wholesale abuse of children. The current and hypocritical arrangement kills and imprisons some relativey innocent adults as a means of controlling and containing erotic impulsivity towards children, but much of life seems to work this way. We may need new stories if we are to act in a more wholesome and communally suportive fashion, but Dr. Kincaid does not succeed in outlining them. Thus the pain and hurt (and titillation) will go on. Maybe there are no better stories. Still, the gauntlet has been flung.

Aside from the lurid title, Mr. Kinkaid's book on the "glorification" of child sexuality is a harsh study on America's fascination with all manner of things erotic. Born in Europe, I can say with some knowledge that Americans do seem to have a bizarre need to know all the details of molestation cases...almost as if they were suffering from the same desires as the perpetrators. Mr. Kinkaid's points are well presented, although to the point of monotony. After several pages devoted to Shirley Temple, I will never be able to view "Heidi" in the same way again. The dichotomy of writing a book of this sort is that Mr. Kinkaid becomes almost as guilty of the very activities of which he accuses Americans. Yes, some ideas and subjects must be broached in a manner that borders on exploitation, but still....a little less detail of certain elements would have sufficed. All in all, Mr. Kinkaid has written a very disturbing, yet highly important work. Perhaps the next time a mother or father decides to dress a nine-year-old girl up in a skimpy bikini, they will think twice before doing so. Cute? Maybe...But what message are we sending, anyway, when we show as much young flesh as we tend to do? Remember Jon-Benet Ramsey?

Kincaid takes on a droll tone throughout this book that urges us to examine our relationship to children. Kincaid wishes to get rid of the paranoia and hysteria around the threat of child molesting and provides some evidence that adults are somewhat sexually attracted to children, but loath to admit it. If we admitted the attraction and stopped treating it like a sick perversion we could live in a saner, less fearful environment. Our culture also celebrates the childlike features as sexual, but we condemn those who get too turned on by them. Beauty contests for children are given as an example of our making children sexy. Kincaid suggests that we stop looking for monsters and sinister purposes in others, thinking that they are potential child molesters. We should stop passing draconian laws that give godlike powers to the police. And we should not accuse others of being child molesters for advocating a lighter approach to child molesting problems.

Kincaid thinks that we are trapped in a never-ending gothic story of a monster that comes after our children and violates their innocence .We then do a lot of porn babbling about the events as if to say, "It is an awful unspeakable story. Please tell it to me in every detail again." The child molesting stories serve prurient interests in adults, sexually titillating them.

Kincaid goes over films and books and pulls out the sexual overtones of child characters in entertainment such as Shirley Temple with her flirtations and kids in their underwear for half of the movie. When a child star reaches adolescence people often forget them since they are no longer cute, but are gangly, awkward looking teenagers. Adult movie goers often make these kiddy films big hits, especially if they produce nostalgia or images of the perfect adorable child along with butt and penis jokes. This also says something about the people producing the films, I must say. I have also noticed on junk TV talk shows, they will have sexy problem children sexually act out by doing a dance, for instance, before they get down to business of trying to cure the child or teen's precociousness. This has a way of arousing the audience and then condemning the sexiness afterwards. Talk about having your cake and eating it too!

People are also indifferent to the many physically abused and neglected kids who are not so cute or adorable. There are a lot of runaway and throwaway kids, but people focus on child abduction and molesting cases rather than deal with the larger and mundane problems of child neglect.

Kincaid encourages us to "change the story" about child molesting so that we can look at the problems another way and quit producing a culture that produces child molesting, monsters, hypocrites, paranoia, and violent vigilante reactions. We seem unwilling to understand ourselves fully.

We should question the innocence of children, which comes from romantic notions of the child. Kincaid asserts that children can be sexy naturally and are not that innocent; it is our romantic notions that make them seem innocent. We should question the veracity of children's testimony and recovered memories from hypnotized adults. He goes over some of the more dubious accusations of child molesting such as the McMartin daycare case which started with a phone call from a paranoid schizophrenic. Child testimony can also be tainted if questions are leading. Often in our culture, if someone is accused of child molesting the public already wants to believe that the accused is guilty and they tend to overlook any contradictions in the testimony against the accused. False accusations of child molesting ruin people's lives.

Kincaid makes light of a usually grave topic, perhaps too much so from time to time. But he does show that some of the brouhaha around child molestation is due to paranoia and hysteria. I think that there is more serious side to it that he does not address.

It would be both easy and comforting to dismiss Kincaid as being prone to over-generalization, as projecting his own sick fantasies onto the world at large, and as being dismissive of the reality of child abuse and its seriousness. It would also be ridiculous. Kincaid presents an excellent thesis (That our culture's Victorian era sexualization of children is responsible for our modern child fixation and abuse, and that this sexualization is harmful to children). He discusses the ways that our erotic fixation on children serves us. Overall, this is a very interesting and compelling book.

There are a few problems with it however:
-He fails to recognize that children (and/or young adolescents) were treated sexually prior to the Victorian reinvention of the child and that there may or may not be biological and/or evolutionary reasons for fixation on children. Kincaid asks repeatedly why we think of children as sexual, what in our culture makes us believe that this is the case, but fails each time to consider that children may in fact Be sexual. I am not suggesting that children are actually legitimate erotic targets, but it is poor logic to never consider the possibility.

-He approaches this discussion from a literary analysis perspective. The thesis may have been better served by a sociologist, a psychologist, an anthropologist, or a historian. Towards the end of the book he attempts to find solutions for our cultural conundrum, and suggests the creation of new stories. He constantly berates well-meaning individuals for prolonging "the conversation". While I agree that in part public discourse that assumes that childhood = victimhood and that sexual abuse = irrevocable damage may be harmful, I find it counter-productive to suggest that not talking about the problem will solve it. Additionally, a social scientist might have had a slightly more cogent grasp of the recovered/false memory controversy.

-Finally, he tends towards utterly irrelevant asides (periodically in defense of Freud, which certainly didn't win him any points with me). Some of these are funny, some of which show his biases, and some of them seem to serve no purpose at all. More editing and a slightly more academic (by which I mean a reliance on evidence and science rather than conjecture and metaphor) take would have made this a much stronger book.

Overall, this book is fascinating, but should be read with a critical eye, and ideally paired with "Harmful To Minors" by Judith Levine.

Want your eyes opened? Read this book. I must warn you though, after flipping through channels a few hours following the introduction of this book, you may want to get rid of your television. Kincaid really ticked me off initially in his intro, but by the end of it I was mesmerized clear through to the end of the book. The thought that we have and still do sexualize children in our country (and world) really sucks at first, but then you realize its true and it almost makes you sick to your stomach. It took so much strength to write this book. I commend you Mr. Kincaid.

I haven't read this book but I had a class with Kincaid. A few remarks: The people whose reviews said that he did not have good evidence did not provide anything better to argue their side. So, without what they consider sufficient evidence for either argument (child abuse is or isn't a social construction), they side with the status quo. In other words, they never even thought about it. Kincaid always told us that he didn't pretend to have unearthed any absolute truth, he just thought it was valid to see things in ways that make you uncomfortable. I hate to sound like a fanatic, but honestly, I've never thought of the world in the same way since having his class. Also, his writing is always well-crafted and frequently hilarious (check out Annoying the Victorians).

Mr. Kincaid presents the reader with an in-depth look at what lies behind the average person's idea of what a child is. Similarly, he shows how this (apparently flawed and dangerous) concept is commonly fit into what he calls a "story," which is a subjective, but shared, view of a certain type of situation. He concentrates on accounts dealing with sexual abuse. Whenever someone is accused of sexually abusing a child, Kincaid says, there is an almost universal compulsion to put people into roles of innocent victim (the child,) protector (the police, and others) and inhuman monster (the accused,) even if it does not fit the facts. Further, he says, this ideal of "child" is very commonplace in works of art, showing that adults have a strange compulsion to be entertained by a certain kind of child, in a certain kind of situation. Then, Kincaid comes to his emphatic conclusion: The reason children are treated and thought of in this way is because adults, all adults, are sexually attracted to children, and simultaneously feel that it is wrong and act to deny and hide it.

The above explanation does not follow from the book's contents. The author presents no evidence (short of listing countless plots of novels and movies involving children, then insisting that they are erotic,) makes no attempt to validate or support his thesis with either psychological, empirical, or sociological data, and worst of all, acts as if this methodology is just hunky-dory. His irrational and similarly unsupported contention that all knowledge and accounts of past events are merely malleable, subjective "stories" is simply a sloppy way of covering up the fact that his entire explanation is arbitrary and unsupported by any logic or truth.

I was certainly willing to consider his ideas, indeed, that is why I read the book at all. In fact, _Erotic Innocence_ is not without its worth. Buried underneath the rambling, egg-headed prose lie some interesting insights. For example, that many people do have a false and harmful idea of what children are or should be. That these same people obsessively and emotionally try to make a predetermined Gothic melodrama play out in every sexual abuse case involving children, even in defiance of facts. Those points, to varying degrees, are reasonably well argued. What is not, is his fantastic explanation of why this is so.

The most ominous thing about this book, though, is that Kincaid purports to be one of but a few people who can cut through the hysteria with truth, when in fact he adds to it a hundredfold by saying that EVERYONE is a pedophile and that (nearly?) every work of art involving children eroticizes them. Furthermore, his solution is not for people to wake up from the "story" and see things as they are, but to instead construct new "stories," i.e. to delude themselves into believing something else. This, he has the gall to call "rational."

"I believe most adults in our culture feel some measure of erotic attraction to children and the childlike; I do not know how it could be otherwise," he writes, in a statement which summarizes the book's logic.

Sorry, Mr. Kincaid. I need a lot more than your testimony of faith to believe such a fantastic story.

This is a dreadful book, one of the worst I've ever read.

In brief, Kincaid cannot write. Admittedly he can put nouns with verbs and form sentences into paragraphs. But he cannot tell a story or present a coherent analysis or argument. And he is a bore of the first magnitude, telling inane stories of no particular point and going off into multiple and serpentine tangents.

He leadens his ancedotes with incessant, irrelevent asides, employing a smart-alecky undergraduate "humor". He is a master of the sweeping, unsupported generalization. He will not let his reader draw his own conclusion, but pounds away at his very limited point.

That point? Simply that American popular culture exploits the dangers of child molestation for its own {commercial}purposes. Way to go professor!

See for example the last paragraph at page 207, as bad a piece of writing as you will ever see. A news-wire story about a child molester in Texas somehow winds up in East Liverpool, Ohio, where the reader is gratutiously informed-twice no less- a Notre Dame football coach hails from. There is also something about "The judge slurping back drool as he spoke". What? This is a god-awful mess.

Or try his final tale at pp. 294-295 where Kincaid takes us to a muddy field outside a circus where a bore is haranguing him while his grand-daughter is about to topple into a pit. What? And talk about calling other people boorish!

The evidence for his main conclusion is his addictive watching of trashy daytime T.V., movies largely featuring little boys such as the "adorable" Culkin kid and wads of old newspaper ads he clips. Presumably his idea of multi-tasking is clipping news articles about weird events while watching Orpah's latest soap opera.

Not surprisingly then Kincaid is himself infatuated with children, primarily boy children. He is especially obsessed with "our national obsession with underpants". That obsession-not surprisingly- is really only his own- projected onto the populace at large. Movies like "Home Alone" and "Stand By Me" are the occasion for him to dwell at length at scenes of boys in their underwear. {I don't know about you, but I've seen these movies several times, and I don't even remember such scenes; but then I am not the scholar Kincaid is}.

He unfortunately must share every piece of his collected trivia with his suffering readers. He not only airs his dirty linen in public, but insists on describing it in gruesome detail, then concluding how sick it shows the rest of us to be.

Kincaid is a pedantic fool who presents himself as the real champion of "our" children. He constantly employs an "our-we-ism" that implies "we" are all in this together, and he is merely our guide- a first among equals. In fact, his tone is one of uncorrupted superiority. He is a nasty little man who insults whole groups and individuals as 'morons', 'idiots', etc.

But his own discussions of movies for instance are primitive in the extreme. They would not pass muster in a tenth grade English class.

This book is a childish and naive tirade against a very soft target. Certainly T.V is a commercial enterprise that exploits "our" lowest aspirations for sex and scandal-be it with children, adults, or for that matter other life forms . But Professor Kincaid's posturing as a contemporary Sigmund Freud uncovering "our" secret peeking at semi-clad children is only his own desire writ large.

Professor Kincaid should stick to boring captive 19 year old undergraduates.

Blaine in Seattle.
blainefielding@gmail.com

I'm not a child molester or a pedophile by any stretch of the imagination, but I picked up this book because it had an interesting thesis- that our culture eroticizes youth and, in a way, invites molesters to act on their impulses.

Kincaid even suggests that Mac Culkin in Home Alone (1 and 2)was chosen for his sexuality- his blonde hair and red lips. I'll be the first to admit that when I saw those films, I thought Culkin was just adorable, but in a sexual way? Come on! Anyone who watches that kind of movie for that is a sicko who should be locked up!

There is a beauty to youth, as Michaelangelo surely observed, but normal, responsible adults know the difference between that pure, ideal beauty and the kind that elicits sexual fantasy.

Kincaid's book is certainly thought provoking, and very well-written, so I give it 3 stars.