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

Certain feminist approaches see issues concerning masculinity at the core of any explanation of child sexual abuse, and most experts agree that child sexual abuse is directly related to the socialization of men.³² Psychologist Janice Haaken has argued that the incest story became a unifying myth in the feminist movement in the 1980s and 1990s, not merely because daughters reveled in “victimhood,” as many have maintained, but also due to rage at the father. When Haaken uses the word myth she does not mean untrue, just that truth contains more than fact, with its meaning in “a larger world of forces.”³³ What I unearth here are aspects of this unifying myth and the extent to which media culture promotes, confronts, or subverts other myths surrounding child sexual abuse.

Writing in the first half of the 1990s, for Carol Tavris child sexual abuse stories crystallized society’s anxieties about the vulnerability of children, the changing roles of women, and the norms of sexuality. Child sexual abuse provides “a clearer focus than such vague enemies as ‘the system,’ sexism, deadening work…‘sexual abuse’ is a metaphor for all that is wrong.”³⁴ Tavris was condemned as a monstrous molester herself for merely uttering such things.³⁵ Thinking about this subject in an attempt to understand it more fully is virtually anathema in many cultures. In 1963 Betty Friedan discussed in The Feminine Mystique the problems of women that “had no name.” By the late 1970s, these problems were being increasingly named as incest. As Haaken explained, patients and therapists became convinced that the source of female disturbances lay in forgotten childhood trauma, with primal scenes of sexual violence and graphic images of family barbarism giving way to stories of child sexual abuse rings and satanic rituals.³⁶

Between 1989 and 1993, numerous books and articles were written supporting allegations of ritual abuse, but other research indicated there was no evidence of organized ritual abuse.³⁷ Elizabeth Loftus, one of the most high-profile American experts on false memory, comprehensively dismissed recovered memory claims and the belief that incest and molestation are central to female experience.³⁸ More balanced work by Kenneth Pope and Laura Brown points to the desperate need for certainty on both sides of the recovered/false memory spectrum.³⁹ With the