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

malleability of memory, however, this certainty is illusory. For Elaine Showalter, women throughout history suffered from hysterical symptoms and still do because they, like men, convert feelings into symptoms when speaking is impossible due to shame, guilt, or helplessness.⁴⁰ Women do not make these stories up intentionally to deceive, but rather to establish an identity, work out anger, or respond to cultural pressure.⁴¹ Showalter was being too simplistic if she was claiming that all these various disorders are merely caused by psychic projection. But media culture is an aspect of the cultural pressures on the psyche, and the variety of feature films explored here indicates the extent of this force.

From a literary and cultural studies perspective, James Kincaid’s work is the most comprehensive and the most eloquent. In Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting (1998), he argued the common belief is that millions of adults find children so attractive they will do anything to entice them, with questions of race, gender, and class being removed in the visage of the pure, desired child. In Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (1992), he explained that talk of the pedophile is commonly “monster talk.”⁴² By attributing to the child the central features of desirability in our culture, such as purity, innocence, and otherness, we have made essential figures that enact this desire. “We must have the deformed monster in order to assure us that our own profiles are proportionate.”⁴³ For Kincaid, the pedophile and the child are roles, functions necessary for our psychic and cultural life. In this argument, the child is not defined or controlled by age limits, since anyone between the ages of one day and twenty-five years or even beyond, in different contexts or cultures, can play that role, and a child changes to fit the different situations and different needs. Kincaid contended that the pedophile is a role and position, brought into being by the eroticizing of the child. He attempted to deconstruct the binary oppositions between adult and child, which he claimed have functioned for two hundred years: The child is that species free of sexual feeling and response; the adult is that species which has crossed over into sexuality. Other binaries are those such as innocence and experience, ignorance and knowledge, incapacity and competence, empty and full, low and high, and weak and powerful.