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

considered to be that which is not natural, and yet media culture in many ways defines what is considered to be natural, what we define as normal. What is natural, or normal, is central to debates concerning pedophilia and child sexual abuse, as is the issue of free will. Why is child sexual abuse considered to be so anathema, and why, culturally, has the pedophile taken on such mythic proportions? An answer to the first of these questions involves scrutinizing the role of the child in society, a subject tackled now. Answers to the second question are contained in the rest of this book.

Myths in popular media and culture become our myths, our reality. Child sexual abuse has been part of human behavior since written records began, but it was in the late 1970s that pedophilia and child sexual abuse fully entered the media zeitgeist. For Marshal McLuhan, media technologies isolate one or another sense from the others, and this results in a form of hypnosis. To engage with any form of media is “to accept these extensions of ourselves into our personal system and to undergo the ‘closure’ or displacement of perception that follows automatically.” The embracing of media technologies “puts us in the Narcissus role of subliminal awareness and numbness to these images of ourselves.”²² To maintain that sad people are merely gullible to the greedy machinations of therapists is just as facile as maintaining that media directly cause violence or child sexual abuse. With this in mind, I shall analyze influential films since the 1960s that have been selected due to their phenomenal popularity or cult status, many blamed for causing abuse, for being exploitative, criticized for containing abuse or condemned for being morally reprehensible.²³

The media and popular culture have engaged with numerous myths about pedophilia and child sexual abuse, and, throughout this exploration, these myths are exposed and demystified. Myth can be defined in a number of ways, but two definitions are particularly pertinent. First, a myth is a traditional story that deals with supernatural beings that serve as primordial types in a primitive view of the world. Second, a myth is a real or fictional story that appeals to the consciousness of people, by embodying its cultural ideals or by giving expression to deep, commonly