Celebrity, Pedophilia, and Ideology in American Culture By Jason ...

before, we deify material wealth, celebrities, and an imagined lost utopia of childhood, with singular attacks on children generating more anguish than hundreds of thousands of lives destroyed in the name of “progress” or “freedom.” Danger lurks around childhood and the image, but just as childhood is worshipped, so the image is sacred, both being concerned with immortality and cheating death. State violence, violence against children in the form of child sexual abuse, and the excesses of capitalism are intimately interconnected. Wars, disaster responses, catastrophes, and panics are so fully privatized that they are themselves the new market.² Likewise, Internet companies, backed by governments and the security forces, perpetuate the idea that the pedophile is always watching, always waiting to entrap our children in their web, that is, unless we purchase their protection devices. While child protection needs to be paramount, reports of a man ignoring a drowning child for fear of being accused a molester and of a parent being attacked for photographing his own child in a park are not merely urban myths that simply reveal our level of fear and mistrust. Such stories force us to consider the disturbing fact that the fear of being accused of being a pedophile outweighs the fear of the threat of pedophilia. Paranoia, whether real or imagined, concerning pedophilia and child abduction has destroyed individual lives and communities, creating societies of distrust and suspicion, so it is important to ask the following: Where do these fears come from, and where do they lead?

In 1997 literary critic Elaine Showalter claimed, in her book Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture, that fear over child sexual abuse is the same as fear connected to all other areas, such as the fear of terrorism, chronic fatigue syndrome, Gulf War syndrome, recovered memory, multiple personality syndrome, satanic ritual abuse, or even stories concerned with abduction by aliens, where frequently tales of sexual abuse occur. This provocative stance ignores many of the complexities and differences, seeing all phenomena as a form of non-distinguishable psychic projection. Showalter was, however, writing in a pre-9/11 age, and more recently the media have made a skewered link between child abuse and supposed terrorists.³ In Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden? (Morgan Spurlock, 2008), a Muslim