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

or both are united. Schizoid, insane, and lunacy are all words used by historian Eric Hobsbawm to describe the political situation during the Cold War, the foundation of our epoch.¹⁷ Medically and psychologically, there is no agreement as to what is or what causes madness or pedophilia, and the image of the pedophile is a reflection of a particular neurosis of the age. When thinking about the sexual abuse of children, we need to think about what love and sex have come to mean. Both are frequently concerned with power and dominance, particularly concerning gender. “Dominance, gender, sex, abuse: these terms are separable, but they run together in our world to produce conditions under which child sexual abuse can occur.”¹⁸ In cultures where sex is situated as aggressive self-fulfillment within competitive capitalism, the sexual abuse of children should not be surprising.

Media images construct the myths we live by and possess a value higher than truth.¹⁹ They have become the ideal reality, the higher truth to be obtained. To understand our conceptions of pedophilia and child sexual abuse, we must examine their construction in film and related novels and screenplays, television, and celebrity culture—that is, what I term media culture. Because of media culture, moral panics have become increasingly rapid and pervasive, encompassing many more people. The panic over child sexual abuse questions the institution of the family and, in particular, the presence of fathers in the home. Moral panic is not mass hysteria but is a technical term coined by sociologists to refer to movements that define actions, groups, or persons as threats to fundamental social values. This does not mean that concern is unfounded; rather, emphasis is on the social construction of a particular danger out of proportion to its threat.²⁰

When we consider the ideology of contemporary media and culture, our culture of illusion, what is believed to be natural is of significance—and Simone Weil’s view on evil is apt: “Does not the evil that we do seem to be something simple and natural which compels us? Is not evil analogous to illusion?”²¹ What we have, then, with the pedophile is not an abomination of nature, but the manifestation of “natural” man, the evil at the heart of man. Culture, by definition, is what could be