Meet the academics who try to redefine pedophilia as “intergenerational intimacy.”There's more in Hendershott's article to depress and dismay those who believe that sexual relationships with children are a moral outrage that society tolerates only at its peril. Thankfully, the reaction to the Penn State and Syracuse cases shows that the champions of pedophilia haven't yet won the cultural battle.
The anger and disgust that most of us experienced when we learned of the allegations of sexual abuse of boys in the sports programs at Penn State and Syracuse University suggest that our cultural norms about the sexual abuse of minors are intact. Yet it was only a decade ago that a parallel movement had begun on some college campuses to redefine pedophilia as the more innocuous “intergenerational sexual intimacy.”
The publication of Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex promised readers a “radical, refreshing, and long overdue reassessment of how we think and act about children’s and teens’ sexuality.” The book was published by University of Minnesota Press in 2003 (with a foreword by Joycelyn Elders, who had been the U.S. Surgeon General in the Clinton administration), after which the author, Judith Levine, posted an interview on the university’s website decrying the fact that “there are people pushing a conservative religious agenda that would deny minors access to sexual expression,” and adding that “we do have to protect children from real dangers … but that doesn’t mean protecting some fantasy of their sexual innocence.”
This redefinition of childhood innocence as “fantasy” is key to the defining down of the deviance of pedophilia that permeated college campuses and beyond. Drawing upon the language of postmodern theory, those working to redefine pedophilia are first redefining childhood by claiming that “childhood” is not a biological given. Rather, it is socially constructed—an historically produced social object.
Such deconstruction has resulted from the efforts of a powerful advocacy community supported by university-affiliated scholars and a large number of writers, researchers, and publishers who were willing to question what most of us view as taboo behavior.
Postmodern theorists are primarily interested in writing that evokes the fragmentary nature of experience and the complexity of language. One of the most cited sources for this is the book Male Intergenerational Intimacy: Historical, Socio-Psychological and Legal Perspectives. This collection of writings by scholars, mostly European but some with U.S. university affiliations, provides a powerful argument for what they now call “intergenerational intimacy.”
Ken Plummer, one of the contributors, writes that “we can no longer assume that childhood is a time of innocence simply because of the chronological age of the child.” In fact, “a child of seven may have built an elaborate set of sexual understandings and codes which would baffle many adults.”
Claiming to draw upon the theoretical work of the social historians, the socialist-feminists, the Foucauldians, and the constructionist sociologists, Plummer promised to build a “new and fruitful approach to sexuality and children.” Within this perspective there is no assumption of linear sexual development and no real childhood, only an externally imposed definition.
Decrying “essentialist views of sexuality,” these writers attempt to remove the essentialist barriers of childhood. This opens the door for the postmodern pedophile to see such behavior as part of the politics of transgression. No longer deviants, they are simply postmodern “border crossers.”
The problem, of course, is that they're not giving up. They're doubtless aware that a society which has lost its moral compass, which can no longer draw limits around marriage, which is loath to find anything wrong with pornography, which regards almost any form of sexual expression as healthy, virtually invites the next step in the progression toward legitimizing the sort of thing Jerry Sandusky is accused of doing with young boys at Penn State.
Hendershott mentions, for example, a 1998 article from the American Psychological Association in which it was concluded that child sexual abuse does not cause harm. The authors recommended that pedophilia should instead be given a value-neutral term like “adult-child sex.” NAMBLA, the National Man-Boy Love Association quickly posted the “good news” on its website, stating that “the current war on boy-lovers has no basis in science.”
We find ourselves in a world that has cut its Judeo-Christian moral anchor and is adrift in a sea of subjectivism. Those who desire us all to dive into the cesspool they themselves wallow in have an agenda, and every person and every generation needs to be vigilant and educated about the threats that agenda poses to our children.
