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

replayed, to reveal any moment in one’s life, making the victim a heroic survivor, the victorious protagonist in their own movie, surviving both apparent abuse and apparent remembering. But the most sagacious and, perhaps, only definite discovery in memory research in the twentieth century was simply, and banally, this: Memory is lost overtime.⁶⁵ Despite this, there is this still an ongoing belief in “total recall.”

With the focus on deliverance, salvation, and “truth,” it is evident that this is a faith movement. To brand any phenomenon as absolute evil is unwise because it bestows on it power and mystery, giving rise to a lack of understanding and a further proliferation of evil.⁶⁶ But sexually abusing children is one of the worst forms of behavior, and as evil means exceeding the limit, then it is unquestionably evil. Let’s not beat around the bush: “Evil shadows the current battle to the death: Capitalism’s effort to destroy Democracy.”⁶⁷ Of course, when belief in God has been removed, then moral questions, like aesthetic questions, become infinitely disputable.⁶⁸ The pedophile galvanizes the public’s attention through a rampant media. The film industry, the fantasy industry, has in a wide variety of ways exploited this fear, frequently maintaining one of our most prevalent myths—that pedophilia and child sexual abuse is unstoppable. But this myth, of course, is true and has existed since the beginning of time and will continue to exist; but this does not, however, stop us trying to stamp it out. In the United States and the United Kingdom, the first backlash against the “tyranny of the pedophile” began in the mid-1990s, but backlashes follow backlashes, with the code of mistrust increasing. This is a deeply disturbing situation, for it concerns the essence of human development: communication through trust. One-to-one contact between adults and children has been stigmatized.⁶⁹ But this is the time of wound culture, and we desperately want to see the stigmata. Pedophile paranoia can only lead to more pedophilia, causing less to be known about child sexual abuse in reality, but analysis of the function of the child in culture and the growing concerns over child sexual abuse help us see the wider perspective in what frequently is too sensitive an issue to be addressed.