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

While this does not negate claims that pedophiles could be genetically predisposed to pedophilia, or the notion that pedophilia is against our predominant genetic coding, there are problems with the word natural. As philosopher Neil Levy has explained, we all feel that nature is as much a normative category as a descriptive one. If something is natural, it is believed to be, ipso facto, good. If it is unnatural, it is necessarily bad.⁴⁴ This applies to both sides of the debate over pedophilia. Defenders say it is as natural as the air we breathe. Opponents argue it is as unnatural as you can get, a perversion of our genetic makeup. But try to define what natural or unnatural is and you get absolutely nowhere. In this context, I am talking about desire, what is natural and unnatural—and, for many, desire is the most natural thing of all. Getting back to Freud, with child sexual abuse, we are in the realm of the uncanny. As Nicholas Royle elaborated, the uncanny touches upon everything you might have thought was part of nature, that is, “one’s own nature, human nature, the nature of reality and world.” It is a crisis of the proper, a disturbance of the very idea of personal or private property—but while being unfamiliar, it is strangely familiar.⁴⁵

Central to this whole analysis is our notion of truth, and Foucault claimed there was no objective truth, which was supposed to liberate us from the idea that humanism is objectively true, making it possible for us to explore new ways of “being, doing and thinking.” This leads not to another theory of human nature, but to an abandonment of all such theories and the possibilities, in Lacan’s words, of “living in conformity with the desire that is in you.”⁴⁶ As Kincaid explained, while the nineteenth century saw the beginnings of sexual essentializing, identifying the person with their sexuality or sexual behavior, it also saw vigorous protests against it. Sexuality became connected with being, and naming that type of sexuality provides an access to a primary essence. One becomes, within the paradigm of power sexuality, what one does with one’s genitals. As we have seen with reference to Marcuse, this is part of the process of capitalism. Kincaid elaborated that Foucault pointed out that the agencies of power in the nineteenth century worked to reinforce the concept of regular, normal (adult homosexual) sex by being increasingly silent about