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

boy keeps kneeling in front of the camera to pray. Spurlock pointed out how easy it would be to alter the meaning of the image and the viewers’ perception, a mendacious voice-over claiming that, from a very young age, “they start manipulating their children…” ⁴ Grand narratives, such as those connected to claims of child sexual abuse, are linked to religious movements, where salvation arrives in admitting you are an abuser or have been abused. This makes sense, given that postmodernism announced the death of grand narratives, which have only been followed by other grand narratives, such as postmodernism itself, religious fundamentalism, or the cry of child sexual abuse. In Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007), philosopher John Gray lucidly pointed out that, despite the benefits religious belief may bring, the dangers of the need for an overarching human narrative are clear, and that conspiracies banish the lack of insignificance, with collective delusions of persecution bolstering a fragile sense of agency. Clearly, narratives of child sexual abuse, along with pedophile paranoia, are unifying narratives that offer meaning.

While it is not my intention to deny the validity or the extent of the occurrences of child sexual abuse, it is important to highlight that many of the claims of child sexual abuse made since the mid-1980s were frequently part of a much larger phenomena that might be termed victim culture, which was linked to aspects of the psychotherapeutic industry. This developed out of psychoanalysis, perhaps the most influential intellectual invention of the twentieth century. Despite Freud’s impact, Michel Foucault claimed this period would eventually be known as the Deleuzean century, and Gilles Deleuze’s most famous work with Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972), demolishes Freud’s most famous theory. In the popular imagination, Freud is associated with delving for, or even inventing, childhood traumas, and hence promoting the idea that child sexual abuse is rampant. This could not be further from the truth, but the relationship between psychoanalysis and child sexual abuse has always been strong. Freud’s most passionate English disciple and advocate, Ernest Jones, had to leave England because of alleged indecent behavior with