What more can they ask for?

In June 1996, the critic Mary Eberstadt
wrote a much-noticed
article for The Weekly Standard entitled “Pedophilia Chic.”
Detailing the many signs in our culture that the taboo against
pedophilia was eroding, the piece caused a sensation, and rightly
so. Eberstadt showed that there were many signs that
pedophilia—and in particular sexual relations between men and
legally underaged boys—was in the process of becoming
“normalized.” Citing as evidence everything from the notorious
Calvin Klein ad campaign for underwear that featured boys and
girls in provocative poses to sympathetic profiles of child
pornographers in mainstream magazines, Eberstadt sounded a
tocsin about this latest instance of what former Senator Daniel
Patrick Moynihan famously called “defining deviancy down.”
Shocking though “Pedophilia Chic” was, in some ways it ended on
a note of cautious optimism. For despite the new acceptance of
pedophilia in many “advanced” quarters, Eberstadt concluded that
general public revulsion against the practice remained
essentially intact. Perhaps, she speculated, the rash of
pedophiliac-friendly phenomena should be understood as “the
last gasp of a nihilism that has exhausted itself by chasing down
every other avenue of liberation, only to find one last roadblock
still manned by the bourgeoisie.”

Well, that was then. Today, it seems, the guard house is often
empty. In “Pedophilia Chic Reconsidered,” the cover story for the
January 1/8 issue of The Weekly Standard, Eberstadt
revisits the issue. Her news is not good. She shows in
meticulous detail how the “social consensus against the sexual
exploitation of children and adolescents . . . is apparently
eroding.” Granted that “the vast majority of citizens” still
“abominate” pedophilia; nevertheless,

elsewhere in the public square, the defense of
adult-child sex—more accurately, man-boy sex
—is now out in the
open. Moreover, it is on parade in a number of
places—therapeutic, literary, and academic circles; mainstream
publishing houses and journals and magazines and bookstores—where
the mere appearance of such ideas would until recently have been
not only unthinkable, but in many cases, subject to prosecution.

Eberstadt has marshalled examples from a broad social
spectrum—technical papers in scholarly journals, opinion pieces
by respected journalists, prize-winning fiction published by
major houses—to show how the interdiction against pedophilia
(“inter-generational relationships” is the current favored
euphemism) has
begun to disintegrate. Or, to be more accurate, she
shows how the
interdiction against man-boy sexual relations
has begun to disintegrate.
The taboo against sexual
exploitation of young girls, she says, remains in force:
“Nobody, but nobody, has been allowed to make the case for girl
pedophilia with the backing of any reputable institution.”

That’s as of January 2001. We would not be at all surprised to
open The Weekly Standard a few years hence to find a third
installment of Eberstadt’s opus showing that, alas, what was
endorsed by “nobody, but nobody” yesterday was today
increasingly common, if not indeed taken-for-granted.
Eberstadt’s two essays on pedophilia
constitute an important piece of cultural and moral criticism. They
are all the more effective for being calmly and patiently argued.
For all her obvious passion about what after all is
a moral
enormity, Eberstadt is careful to keep a firm hand on her
rhetoric. She is admonitory but not alarmist. And she is surely
right when she concludes that “If the sexual abuse of minors
isn’t wrong, then nothing is.”

Compelling though Eberstadt’s reflections are, however, we found
ourselves wondering whether in the end she did not rather
understate the problem she did so much to expose. Toward the end
of “Pedophilia Chic Reconsidered,” Eberstadt writes that

it is tempting to throw up one’s hands on reading a litany like
this one, and to blame it all on our anything-goes postmodern
life. But this is determinism masquerading as pessimism, and a
determinism that does not fit the facts. Today’s pressures to
normalize pedophilia are not the result of some omnipotent and
unstoppable taboo-devouring social and moral juggernaut; they are
occurring one bookstore, one magazine, one publisher and
advertiser, one author and editor and consumer at a time. Case by
case, given a more enlightened public, it is not hard to imagine
these decisions—like the one that led to Penguin’s putting its
imprimatur on a pedophilic sex scene, or like the misguided
efforts by some gay organizations to refer teens to unsavory and
perhaps even unsafe websites—being made otherwise.

There is clearly a lot to be said for Eberstadt’s caveats. And
considered practically—as an answer to the question “What should
be done?”—her ad hoc, case-by-case approach has much to
recommend it. But
if it is the better part of wisdom to avoid
“determinism masquerading as pessimism,” it is also wise to
acknowledge widespread cultural trends for what they are. That is
not pessimism but realism. It is certainly true that “pressures to
normalize pedophilia are not the result of some omnipotent and
unstoppable taboo-devouring social and moral juggernaut.” But
those pressures are part
of a larger cultural-moral shift—and
an enormously powerful one. No juggernaut is “omnipotent” or
“unstoppable.” But one can point to many cultural trends that run
like wildfire through a society. The sexual revolution of the
1960s and 1970s was one such development. We believe that the
normalization of man-boy pedophilia that Eberstadt decries can
only be understood when seen in the context of that larger
emancipatory—or pseudo-emancipatory—
project.

The pressures to normalize pedophilia did not emerge in a vacuum.
They are a natural outgrowth of the same liberationist ethos that
underwrote the culture of “free love” in the 1960s and that
underwrites in our own day the dramatically increased prevalence
of such “transgressive” phenomena as “sex-change” operations,
“trans-sexuality,” sado-masochism, pornography, and other sexual
exotica that had hitherto been confined to the nethermost fringe
of human imagining. The fact that no trendy college today is without
courses catering to the “differently gendered” shows that the
process of “normalization” Eberstadt discerned with respect to
pedophilia is proceeding apace in other out-of-the-way
neighborhoods of human sexuality.

Eberstadt may well—in fact she probably does—give
us the best formula for responding to the pressure to normalize
pedophilia. But if criticism is to be more than “case- by-case”—if
it is to address the moral climate that makes such normalization possible—then
it has to step back to consider the larger cultural situation. Writing
about Bruce Bawer’s book A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual
in American Society in National Review in 1993, Father
Richard John Neuhaus observed that

there is no denying that public debates over
homosexuality in the last decade and more have often
been fevered, confused, uncivil, and downright nasty.
It is frequently forgotten that agitations about
homosexuality are part of a great cultural commotion
about sexuality itself. The homosexual
insurgency did not come out of nowhere. It is the
logical extension of the doctrine, which has now
assumed dogmatic status in this “therapeutic
society,” that there is no higher morality than
self-realization through self-expression. Some
heterosexuals who oppose the insurgency, including
some calling themselves conservatives, do not have the
nerve or the wit to challenge the dogma that
gave it birth. They wink at fornication and adultery,
and take in stride the serial polygamy that is the
current practice of divorce. They are in a doubtful
moral position to censure homosexuals, who, in
Joseph Campbell’s feather-brained phrase, also want to
“follow their bliss.”

Neuhaus’s essay is far and away the most searching commentary on
Bruce Bawer’s book precisely because it places the debate about
“gay rights” in the larger context of the meaning of human
sexuality generally—
a realm, he emphasizes, “of ambiguity, confusion, gradation,
temptation, and decision,” but also “a realm of moral
possibility.” Denying the moral dimension of sexuality is at the
center of the gospel of sexual emancipation, which is one reason
that gospel has proved to be so shallow. Regarding sex primarily
as an instrument of self-gratification, it tends to foster what
the philosopher Roger Scruton called the Kinsey view of sex:
“a tingling of the genitals, with orgasm as the goal and the
partner as the means to it.” In this sense, “sexual liberation”
is a liberation of sex from the future—a liberation, that is to
say, that turns out to be a new form of enslavement. Regarded in
this way, sex offers less a window on the world than a
narcissist’s mirror. As Neuhaus noted later in his essay on
Bawer’s book, “Our culture is largely dominated by the imperative
of being ‘free to be me’—with ‘me’ being defined by our
strongest libidinal urgencies.” If those self-defining urges
prompt one to have sexual relations with boys, girls, newts, or
corpses, can society legitimately object?

Of course it can. But only if it challenges
the motivating
premise underlying the dogma of the sexual revolution:
that sexual “self-fulfillment” is an ultimate good to
which all other goods must be subordinated. What we see in
the pressure to normalize pedophilia, “trans-sexuality,”
“gender-reassignment surgery,” and the rest is the logical flowering of
the emancipationist ideology outlined by such gurus of sexual
liberation as Herbert Marcuse in the 1950s and 1960s.
In Eros and Civilization—a book that was first published in
1959 and that became a bible of the counterculture—Marcuse spins a
fairytale about the fate of humanity in the modern world. He
conjures up the image of a “non-repressive reality principle” in
which “the body in its entirety would become . . . an instrument
of pleasure.”

What this really amounts to is a form of infantilization. Thus
Marcuse speaks glowingly of “a resurgence of pregenital
polymorphous sexuality” that “protests against the repressive
order of procreative sexuality.” He recommends returning to a
state of “primary narcissism” in which one will find “the
redemption of pleasure, the halt of time, the absorption of
death; silence, sleep, night, paradise—the Nirvana principle not
as death but as life.” In other words, he looks forward to a
community of solipsists. Marcuse is quite explicit about the
social implications of his experiment in narcissism. “This change
in the value and scope of libidinal relations,” he writes, “would
lead to a disintegration of the institutions in which the private
interpersonal relations have been organized, particularly the
monogamic and patriarchal family.” That is to say, ultimate
liberation is indistinguishable from ultimate self-absorption.

Despite various setbacks—many precipitated by the threat of
AIDS—Marcuse’s vision of total sexual indulgence has become
a
guiding ideal of our society. In sheer extravagance, Marcuse’s
blend of radical, Marxoid political hectoring and neo-Freudian
sexual fantasy has few rivals. But he was hardly the first to
understand the kinds of changes that would follow upon a
systematic emancipation of human sexuality from what he
disparagingly calls “procreative eros.” We think, for example of
Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World. It is not, we
think, a particularly good novel. As a piece of social-moral
prognostication, however, it has proved to be remarkably
prescient (even if Huxley’s notion of sexual emancipation,
involving only relations between men and women, seems almost prim
by contemporary standards). Huxley was writing in the early
1930s. But he foresaw with startling exactitude the numbing
spiritual wreckage that follows upon the effort of mankind to
remake itself in its own image and divorce sexuality from
procreation. (Not for nothing were the
words “mother,”
“monogamy,” and “romance” considered obscenities in Huxley’s
anti-paradise.) Today, as we contemplate the awesome
potentialities of genetic engineering, on the one hand, and
recent efforts to normalize the more florid precincts of sexual
divagation, on the other, it is hard not to admire Huxley’s
crystal ball. He
was right that the two things go together.
He
was also right that their union leads
to infantilization—even,
perhaps especially, among the most privileged members of society:
“It is their duty to be infantile,” one character says, “even
against their inclination.” Two other items need to be taken into
account. One is euthanasia—a crucial feature of Huxley’s
brave new world, as, increasingly, it is of ours. The other is
mood-altering, ecstasy-producing drugs. Huxley called his imagined
concoction soma: we have other names for the real things,
including, of course, “ecstasy.”

Some two-thirds of the way through Brave New World, a character
known as the Controller is asked whether working people are happy
in their drug-ordered, genetically-reprocessed,
sexually-promiscuous society. “They like it,” he replies. “Seven
and a half hours of mild, unexhausting labour, and then the
soma ration and games and unrestricted copulation and the
feelies. What more can they ask for?” Of course, Huxley meant his
readers to discern an irony in that question that passes the
Controller by. The frightening thought is that we may be rapidly
approaching a situation in which such questions can be asked
without fear of irony or rebuke.