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

it, armoring it with the strength of an unspoken assumption. Matters that had previously scarcely been noticed were spoken about obsessively: children’s sexuality, madness, criminal sex, homosexuality or inversion, reveries, and obsessions. The reason for this, claimed Foucault, was to increase awareness of “abnormality” and emphasize the “normality” of the home. We might find a logical comparison with some of the contemporary constructions of the pedophile, but things have shifted considerably. Shockingly, the pedophile today has been normalized, as he is now supposedly lurking in every home. Perversion is pervasive in every household, behind every door. In our late capitalist world where private property is valued above all else, observation becomes the fullest means of control, but without privacy there is no autonomy. How do we practically balance child protection with autonomy, and how can the police be given the powers to investigate real cases of abuse if any accusation is reacted to in a knee-jerk fashion?

1.3. Popular Culture and Total Recall

The most extensive child sexual abuse case, which was the longest trial of its era in U.S. history, is that which formally began in 1984 concerning Virginia McMartin and six of her employees; the case reveals the pernicious power of the media, particularly talk shows. At a school in Manhattan Beach, California, arrests were made concerning the alleged child sexual abuse of 125 students. Large-scale abuse cases then made the U.S. media, such as that in Jordan, Minnesota, when fifty children were part of a case involving twenty-four parents, making the cover of Newsweek in May 1984, and similar stories were covered by Life in November of the same year, as well as by television news programs. ‘The McMartin Pre-School Case’ ran from 1983 to 1990. On 12 August 1983 Judy Johnson telephoned Manhattan Beach Police Department and accused teacher Raymond Buckey of sodomizing her son. Buckey, his sister, mother, and grandmother, and three other teachers were charged with over 200 accounts of child molesting involving forty-two children. On 18 January 1990 in the first trial Buckey was acquitted on fifty-two