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

During the early 1990s, when Kincaid was writing Child-Loving, the pedophile was believed to be the freak across the road, the weirdo loner, always elsewhere, “stranger danger” being the buzz-word. Since the late 1990s, he is Everyman. Kincaid achieved what campaigners against child molestation want all to realize: The threat is in the home, with the biological father committing the majority of child sexual abuse, which is, by the way, a fact.

The Western world was promised paradise on earth by commercial industrialism. This was “detailed in the Hollywood Myth that replaced the paradise in heaven of the Christian myth. And now psychology must replace them both with the myth of paradise through self-knowledge.”⁵⁹ Since the beginning of time, many have been consumed by this desire to discover paradise through “self-knowledge,” but it really kicked in with Freud. As we know too well, this has become an industry in itself—discover the real you! The Socratic dictum “know thyself” is not a dangerous one, but this powerful myth encourages the hunt for, and even invention of, memories that may give deeper meaning to the present. Along with the confession of this “most heinous of evils” by the victim or perpetrator comes, logically, the most redemption. The soteriological nature of this cannot be denied. American culture conceives child sexual abuse as a stain on both the victim and the perpetrator, and this must be washed away through confession, by any means. Metaphors do speak the truth but are not the truth themselves.⁶⁰ The fear and cry of child sexual abuse may point to something other than its literal meaning. The American obsession with the inner child, often an abused, voiceless child, began in the 1960s. This, added to the developments in surveillance technology in the 1970s and the immense popularity of confessional television shows in the 1980s and 1990s, led to the notion that all that is hidden must be revealed; in a religious sense, all that is dark must come to light, the godlike eye of the camera proffering on the dual observer and partaker the opportunity to be cleansed and saved. The culture analyzed in the following chapters plays with aspects of society’s “wound culture” and is part of the public’s fascination with violently torn and opened private bodies, as well as torn and opened psyches.⁶¹