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

media discourse, where aspects of power are at play—and while this wordplay sounds innocent enough, it is my intention to unearth and expose aspects of this ideology, explaining why, as Patrick Bateman put it, “these are terrible times.”

1.1. Ideology, Myth, and the Media

Building on the work of Freud and Marx, Herbert Marcuse used aspects of Max Weber’s famous analysis of the Protestant work ethic, which was concerned with the irrational psychological need to perform, to work for work’s own sake, and incorporated within it an analysis of the techniques of mass manipulation and the organization of leisure by the communications and entertainment industries. Play itself is systematized as work, for there is no escape—and in our media-dominated age, conformity has replaced consciousness.¹³ This is regressive, fostering a passive and servile mass of consumers. Whether consumers of images are passive is debatable, and there are deep moral questions raised by those who watch child abuse images, a subject we shall return to. Marcuse was building on Marx’s notion of alienation, of people being transformed into things, objects, through labor. We shall see that within this is an explanation for the relationship between child sexual abuse and capitalism. Freud implied that biology accounted for the progression of sexual organizations, from the generalized eroticism of earliest infancy to the genital sexuality of adolescence and adulthood. For Marcuse, the performance principle perverted progression. This led to a nearly complete desexualization of the pregenital erotogenic zones and reinforced genitalization of sexuality. The libido is then concentrated in the genitals only, and this allows the rest of the body to be “free” to be used as an instrument for labor. Mankind longed to return to the state of “polymorphous perversity,” the position that, according to Freud, the child is in. Perversions express rebellion against the subjugation of sexuality under the order of procreation and against the institutions that guarantee this order. Within this Freudian discourse, perversions can be seen as the antithesis of abnormality and as a form of purity.