“Not long ago I took part in one of the conversations you’re not supposed to have. It turned on whether Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita, really desired underage girls. The usual arguments came out: Nabokov was a master of personae, and Humbert Humbert a game to him. Kinbote, analogous narrator of Pale Fire, didn’t make you think Nabokov loved boys. The late novels were Nabokov’s allegories of the seductions of aestheticism, which transfigures the forbidden into the beautiful; or moral paintings of our acceptance of crime, when crime is presented alluringly. So love of the wrong object becomes a metaphor for art, ethics, personality, and so forth.”
“I was reluctant to say that I felt these explanations were inadequate and even in bad faith. The trouble with Lolita is plainly its ability to describe what a sexual 12-year-old looks like. What her dress is like when it brushes her knees, what her toes are like with painted nails, how the color sits on the plump bow of her lips — the phrase for this is that it is “too real”; that’s the scandal. It continues to be the scandal fifty years after publication, and it will be a scandal whenever any adult acknowledges the capacity to upend his vision and see a child, protected larval stage of the organism, as a sexual object. The girl is still a child, only now she is a sex child. Yet this makes me feel Nabokov was not a pedophile, but something he is not credited with being — a social critic.”
“The more a whole nation inspects the sex characteristics of children to make sure it is not becoming aroused by childishness, and slyly hunts around to make sure its most untrustworthy members are not being so aroused, the more it risks creating a sexual fascination with the child.”
“However you gaze, to accept the fantasy, or to assure yourself you see nothing, you join in an abomination.”
“We live in the afternoon of the sex children; Nabokov just saw the dawn.”
“It took the whole history of postwar American culture to make the sex child. It required a merging of old prurient fantasies, dating from the Victorians and Progressives, with the actual sexual liberation of children after mid-century. You needed the expansion of the commercial market for children—selling to kids with sex as everything is sold with sex. You needed the bad faith of Madison Avenue advertisers and Seventh Avenue fashion writers. You needed the sinister prudery of Orange County evangelicalism and the paraliterature of child sex that arises in antipedophilia crusades (Treacherous Love; It Happened to Nancy)—erotica purveyed to middle-school libraries. You needed the internet.”
“The lure of a permanent childhood in America partly comes from the overwhelming feeling that one hasn’t yet achieved one’s true youth, because true youth would be defined by freedom so total that no one can attain it.”
“The new full-scale campus sex magazines (e.g., Boston University’s Boink [2005] and Harvard’s H Bomb [2004]) seek truth in naked self-photography and accounts of sex with strangers as if each incident were God’s revelation on Sinai. The lesson each time is that sleeping with strangers or being photographed naked lets the authors know themselves better. Many of these institutions are driven by women. Perhaps they, even more than young men, feel an urgency to know themselves while they can—since America curses them with a premonition of disappointment: when flesh sags, freedom will wane.”
“Yet the early reality of sex childhood is its restrictive practical dimension. It exists only in the context of the large institutions that dominate children’s lives, the schools. In these prisonlike closed worlds of finite numbers of children, with no visible status but the wealth they bring in from outside (worn as clothes) and the dominance they can achieve in the activities of schooldays (friend making, gossiping, academic and athletic success), sex has a different meaning than in adult licentiousness or collegiate glory. Sex appeal is demanded long before sex, and when sex arrives, it appears within ordinary romantic relationships. New sexual acts are only substitutes for any earlier generation’s acts, as you’d expect. Where petting was, there shall fellatio be.”
“It will simply never be the case that children can treat sex with the free-floating fantasy and brutality that adults can, because we adults are atomized in our dealings with others as children in school are not.”
“If I do something rotten on a blind date, I never need to see the only witness again. A child does something rotten, and his date is sitting next to him in homeroom. The adult world sends down its sexual norms, which cannot blossom in a closed institution (though alarmists say they originate there), but which the children tuck away to fulfill just as soon as they can.”
“Children are the beneficiaries of a culture that declares in all its television, jokes, talk, and advertising that if sex isn’t the most significant thing in existence, it is the one element never missing from any activity that is fun.”
“They are watchers, silent, with open eyes, and they grow in the blue light.”
“The dirty magazines and their supposedly legitimate counterparts in fact play a significant role in the system of sex childhood. In Larkin’s life, the poetry of longing went hand in hand with the fulfillments of porn, and all of us share in this interchange at a more banal level.”
“The colloquialisms “men’s magazines” and “women’s magazines” generally seem to name two very different sets of publications.”
““Women’s magazines” are instructional—how to display oneself, how to serve men, and nowadays (maybe always) how to steal sexual and emotional pleasure from men, outwitting them, while getting erotic and affective satisfactions, too, in the preparations for your self-display.”
““Men’s magazines,” for their part, are pornographic—how to look at women, how to fantasize about women, how to enjoy and dominate, and what one becomes while fantasizing this domination. The two genres are distinct, but continuous.”
“The women’s advice and fashion magazines, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Elle, Vogue, hold a permanent mandate for an erotic youthfulness, though not literal sexual youth. They provide shortcuts to staying young for old and young alike: how to keep your skin young, how to keep your muscles young, how to keep your ideas young, how to feel perpetually young, how to siphon vitality from elsewhere to be “young” even if you’re not, literally, young, and how to use your youth if you are. You learn early what you’ll lose late, and get accustomed to denying the aging that you might never have minded as much without this help.”
“Men’s magazines fix readers’ desires in the range of women’s shapes and bodies and modes of seduction and subordination—fragmenting the market by body part and sex act and level of explicitness, but also by age. Pornography has a special investment in youth. The college girl is a central feature of Playboy in its “Girls of the Big Ten” pictorials; Hustler has a relentless Barely Legal franchise in magazines and videos, aped by Just 18 and Finally Legal and all the bargain titles behind the convenience-store counter. In the demimonde of the internet, an even more central category of all online pornography is “teen.” Of course it is profoundly illegal in the United States to photograph anyone under 18 sexually; in what is called 2257 compliance, producers of pornography must keep public legal records proving that every model is 18 or older. Technically, therefore, there are only two ages, 18 and 19, at which “teen” models can be actual teens. Nor do the models ever seem to be sexually immature; child pornography doesn’t seem to be what the sites are for. Rather, putative teen models are made situationally immature—portrayed with symbols of the student life, the classroom, the cheerleading squad, the college dorm, the family home, the babysitting, the first job; not the husband, not the child, not the real estate brokerage or boardroom or bank office, never adult life.”
“Thus a society that finds it illegal to exploit anyone beneath the age of legal majority is at the same time interested in the simulation of youth—often by people who are sexually mature but still only on the cusp of adulthood. And in its legitimate publications, as in its vice, it encourages a more general, socially compulsory female urgency to provision youth across the life span, and a male rush to take it.”
“For in a culture to which sex furnishes the first true experiences, it makes a kind of sense to return to the ages at which sex was first used to pursue experience and one was supposedly in a privileged position to find it. Now we begin to talk, not about our sex per se, but about a fundamental change in our notion of freedom, and what our lives are a competition for.”
“We must begin to talk directly about the change that was well begun in Nabokov’s day and is well advanced in ours, the transformation that created the world in which we are both freed and enslaved. That was sexual liberation.”
“Liberation implies freedom to do what you have already been doing or have meant to do. It unbars what is native to you, free in cost and freely your possession, and removes the iron weight of social interdiction.”
“Even in the great phase of full human liberation which extended from the 1960s to the present day, however, what has passed as liberation has often been liberalization. (Marcuse used this distinction.) Liberalization makes for a free traffic in goods formerly regulated and interdicted, creating markets in what you already possess for free. It has a way of making your possessions no longer native to you at the very moment that they’re freed for your enjoyment. Ultimately you no longer know how to possess them, correctly, unless you are following new rules which emerge to dominate the traffic in these goods.”
“In sexual liberation, major achievements included the end of shame and illegality in sex outside of marriage (throughout the 20th century); the disentangling of sex from reproduction (completed with the introduction of the oral contraceptive pill in 1960); the feminist reorganization of intercourse around the female orgasm and female pleasure (closer to 1970); and the beginning of a destigmatization of same-sex sexuality (1970 to the present). The underlying notion in all these reforms was to remove social penalties from what people were doing anyway.”
“One of the cruel betrayals of sexual liberation, in liberalization, was the illusion that a person can only be free if he holds sex as all-important and exposes it endlessly to others—providing it, proving it, enjoying it.”
“This was a new kind of unfreedom. In hindsight, the betrayal of sexual liberation was a mistake the liberators seemed fated to make.”
“Because moralists had said for so many centuries, “Sex must be controlled because it is so powerful and important,” sexual liberators were seduced into saying, in opposition, “Sex must be liberated because it is so powerful and important.” But in fact a better liberation would have occurred if reformers had freed sex not by its centrality to life, but by its triviality. They could have said: “Sex is a biological function—and for that reason no grounds to persecute anyone. It is truthless—you must not bring force to bear on people for the basic, biological, and private; you may not persecute them on grounds so accidental. You must leave them alone, neither forcing them to deny their sex nor to bring it into the light.””
“This misformulation of liberation only became as damaging as it did because another force turned out to have great use for the idea that sex is the bearer of the richest experiences: commerce.”
“To say that a bodily impulse is something all of us have, and no regimentation or expertise or purchases can make one have it any more, is to become filthy and disgusting. It is to be nonproductive waste in an economy of markets, something nonsalable.”
“It is not the repression of sex that opposes liberation (just as Foucault alerted us), but “inciting” sex as we know it—whatever puts sex into motion, draws it into publicity, apart from the legitimate relations between the private (the place of bodily safety) and the public (the sphere of equality).”
“The question remains why liberalization turned back to gorge itself on youth.”
“From the desire to repossess what has been lost (or was never truly taken advantage of) comes, in the end, the ceaseless extension of competition.”
“It is easily encouraged. It doesn’t require anything nefarious or self-conscious, certainly not top-down control, though it’s sometimes convenient to speak of the process metaphorically as a field of control. All it requires is a culture in which instruments of commentary and talk (news, talk shows, advice magazines) are accompanied and paid for by advertisers of aesthetic and aestheticizable products—everything from skin-cream to Viagra to cars.”
“Once people can be convinced that they need to remain young for others to desire them, and that there are so many instrumentalities with which they can remain young; once they can be encouraged to suspect that youth is a particularly real and justifiable criterion for desire, then the competition will accelerate by the interchange of all these talkers: the professional commentators and product vendors and the needy audiences and ordinary people.”
“For society as a whole, gazing at those youths who are sexually mature but restricted from the market institutionally or legally, sex children become that most perfect of grounds for competition, a fantastic commodity unattainable in its pure form.”
“Hence the final double bind of social preoccupation with the sex children in a commercial society regimented by a vain pursuit of absolute freedom.”
“On one side, the young become fascinating because they have in its most complete form the youth which we demand for ourselves, for our own competitive advantage. They are the biologically superrich whose assets we wish to burgle because we feel they don’t know the treasures they keep; they stand accidentally at the peak of the competitive pyramid.”
“Desire for sex childhood is thus a completion of the competitive system.”
“On the other side, the sex child as an individual is the only figure in this order who is thought to be free from competition; who holds sex as still a natural good, undiminished, a capability, purely potential—not something ever scarcer and jeopardized by our unattractiveness and our aging. For sex children, sex remains a new experience of freedom and truth that retains its promise to shape a better self. The kids are not innocent of carnality but they are innocent of competition.”
“Desire for sex childhood thus becomes a wish for freedom from the system.”
“There are valuable contributions to criminology and psychology on the library shelves, which outline the problems of pedophilia and sexual abuse and molestation, often with in-depth interviews. I couldn’t read very much of them. Sorry as I felt for these men, it seemed clear to me they should be destroyed. But this was really insane, and went against my other beliefs. So I began to consider: What is the meaning of abomination today, in a nonreligious age? It must be that there are points of cultural juncture at which phenomena are produced that, though explicable, are indefensible in the terms of any of the structures which produce or analyze them.”
“You don’t want to appeal to trauma, rehabilitation, socialization, or biological inclination. You can’t just run away from the phenomena, and yet they can’t be brought into the other terms of social analysis without an unacceptable derangement of values. This explains the impasse in which the annihilative impulse takes hold.”
“A fraction of young people are extraordinarily highly valued, emulated, desired, examined, broadcast, lusted after, attended to in our society. These legal ex-children are attended to specifically as repositories of fresh sexuality, not, say, of intellect or even beauty. As their age goes up to 17, 18, and 19, the culture very quickly awards them its summit of sexual value.”
“Yet as their age goes down from some indefinite point, to 16, 15, 14, and so on, the sexual appeal of childhood quickly reaches our culture’s zone of absolute evil. Worse than the murderer, worse than the adult rapist of adults, and even worse than the person who physically and emotionally abuses children, is the person who sexually tampers with a child in any degree—who can then never be reintegrated into society except as a sex offender—or is simply the author of monstrous thoughts, a cyberstalker netted in police stings in chatrooms, or found downloading underage images to his hard drive. This is the “pedophile” whether or not he acts.”
“Since the two zones—maximum value of sex, and maximum evil for sex—are right next to each other, shouldn’t we wonder if there’s some structural relation in society between our supergood and absolute evil?”
“The most direct explanation is that we may be witnessing two disparate systems as they come into conflict at just one point.”
“System A would be the sexual valuation of youth, spurred by the liberalization of sex and its attachment to youth in a competitive economy.”
“System B would be adult morality, the moral impulse to shield beings who need protection from sexual tampering and attention—because of the cruel nonreciprocity inflicted on a young child who doesn’t yet have sexual desire (in true pedophilia, molestation of those beneath pubescence); the equally cruel coercion of those old enough to desire but not to have an adult’s power to consent or to see how their actions will look to a future self (molestation of adolescents); and the deep betrayal, in all acts of sexual abuse, of the order of society and of its future, in something like a society-level version of the taboo on incest.”
“Now, System A (sexual value, commerce) possesses a major flaw in its tendency to drive sexual attention down the age scale relentlessly—even to those legal children who hold sex in its newest and most inaccessible form. System B would fight this tendency, trying to provide necessary restraints; but perhaps it becomes most destructively punitive just where it refuses to disavow System A entirely. By otherwise accepting the sexual value of youthfulness, in other words—with such threatening possible side effects—morality would have to narrow itself vengefully upon the single point of visible contradiction, and overpunish whomever pursues too much youth, or does so too literally.”
“One fears our cultural preoccupation with pedophilia is not really about valuing childhood but about overvaluing child sex.”
“It would be as if the culture understood it must be so ruthless to stop tampering with real children, just because it is working so hard to keep afloat the extreme commercial valuation of youth and its concrete manifestations in the slightly older sex child.”
“Does the culture react so vehemently at just this point because were the screen of morality to collapse, the real situation would have to be confessed—the child’s extreme uninterest in adults; the child’s sexual “liberation” as a sub-effect of our own false liberation; the brutalization of life at all levels by sexual incitement?”
“It seems likely that an incessant overvaluing of the sex of the young will train some people toward wrong objects. This should swell the numbers of the class of incipient or intermittent wrongdoers who might no longer see a bright line between right and wrong—because social discourse has made that beam wobble, then scintillate, attract, and confuse.”
“If this is so, such immoral attention is not just a matter of a “loosening” of morality, but the combination of liberalization (not liberation) with a blinkered form of cultural interdiction. The pedophilic sensibility of the culture is strengthened. Thus we may produce the obsession we claim to resent; the new pedophile would become a product of our system of values.”
“The reason it seems a sex of pure politeness and equal access does not work is that the constant preparation to imagine any and every other person as a sexual object (something our culture already encourages) proves to be ruthlessly egocentric and antisocial, making every other living body a tool for self-pleasure or gain.”
“At times I wonder if we are witnessing a sexualization of the life process itself, in which all pleasure is canalized into the sexual, and the function of warm, living flesh in any form is to allow us access to autoerotism through the circuit of an other.”
“This is echoed at the intellectual level in the discourse of “self-discovery.” The real underlying question of sexual encounter today may not be “What is he like in bed?” (heard often enough, and said without shame) but “What am I like in bed?” (never spoken). That is to say, at the deepest level, one says: “Whom do I discover myself to be in sex?”—so that sex becomes the special province of self-discovery.”
“Self-discovery puts a reflecting wall between the self and attention to the other, so that all energy supposedly exerted in fascination, attraction, and love just bounces back, even when it appears to go out as love for the other. When self-discovery is combined with the notion of a continually new or renewed self, and this newness is associated with literal or metaphorical youth—well, then you simply have a segment of the affluent first world at the present moment.”
“This means the trivialization of sex and the denigration of youth will have to start with an act of willful revaluation. It will require preferring the values of adulthood: intellect over enthusiasm, autonomy over adventure, elegance over vitality, sophistication over innocence—and, perhaps, a pursuit of the confirmation or repetition of experience rather than experiences of novelty.”
“Know that what we wish to be nourished upon is age and accomplishment, not emptiness and newness. Then, in sophisticated and depraved sexuality, rather than youth’s innocence and the fake blush of truth, let our remaining impulses run in the sex of the old for the old—until they run out. Make a model for a better era.”
“Neither the historical nor the biological argument seems to meet the problem of the sex child as we now know it, because I think neither captures our current experience of desire, in which the sex children come in only secondarily, through some kind of mediation of fancy; in our real lives adults feel the sexual appeal of other adults.”
“Unless sexual desire is wholly unconscious, not plastic and social, and the social level entirely a screen or delusion—a very complex delusion to cover biological determinism—then with the sex children it’s my sense that we are dealing primarily with the sexual appeal of youth rather than the actual determinative sexual attractiveness of youths.”
“It would be something like a desire for the sex child’s incipience, the child’s taste of first majority before the rules clamp down: youth as eternal becoming, in eternal novelty of experience. Apart from such fancies, the appeal of sexually mature children seems to me particularly weak, not strong.”