Dare We Get Real About Sex?
“Pedophilia Chic” & the Challenge to Conservatism
by Carson Holloway
Cultural conservatives, horrified by the precipitous decline in public decency over the last generation, must ask with an even greater dread: What comes next? Mary Eberstadt, writing in The Weekly Standard, provides an unsettling answer in her two articles, “Pedophilia Chic” (June 17, 1996) and “Pedophilia Chic Reconsidered” (January 1, 2001). “The social consensus against the sexual exploitation of children and adolescents . . . is apparently eroding,” she notes, documenting her claim with a disturbing survey of recent literature, science, and social commentary arguing for or insinuating the normality of adult sexual contact with teenagers and even prepubescent children.
Eberstadt’s concern is more specifically with the homosexual exploitation of boys, the legitimization of which, she contends, is toyed with more and more openly in some sectors of elite opinion. Nevertheless, as others have noted, there is also reason to fear a growing tolerance of the heterosexual exploitation of girls. While the cultural acceptance of man-boy sex has been suggested by some intellectuals, such suggestions reach only a rather narrow audience, for example, the readers of anthologies of gay literature or of such magazines as Vanity Fair or The New Republic. On the other hand, experimental ventures in underage heterosexual erotica, while less explicitly sexual, can be seen on television. Witness, for example, the far from innocent presentation of teenage pop stars such as Britney Spears in recent years.1
Eberstadt’s aim in revealing these troubling developments is to encourage resistance against them. Yet, to be effective, such resistance must be thoughtful. To counter them, we must understand their origins.
We must ask why it now seems reasonable, among some people at least, to permit sexual relations between adults and children. Such an investigation, I contend, indicates that the repugnant trends Eberstadt ably illuminates and rightly condemns are more deeply rooted in our culture than her treatment suggests.
Insofar as she emphasizes the still overwhelming public disapproval of pedophilia, in both its man-boy and man-girl manifestations, Eberstadt’s argument implies that the problem can be easily corrected, that it is simply a matter of awakening ordinary, decent people to the dangerous speculations of morally corrupt intellectual elites. Indeed, she concludes “Pedophilia Chic Reconsidered” by confidently asserting that “it is not and will not be the case” that the tolerance now commonly extended to homosexuals “can be parlayed into support for predators.”
In contrast, I argue that the current trend in the direction of the normalization of pedophilia is just the latest manifestation of a problematic understanding of human sexuality that has come to be more widely and deeply held over the last 30 years. Moreover, by both its prevalence and its dangerousness, this understanding poses a serious challenge to contemporary cultural conservatism, which, I conclude, can hope successfully to address these issues only by returning to its roots and rendering plausible once again the Christian understanding of human sexuality. Nothing else will do.
American Sexual Morality
Writing over a century and a half ago, Alexis de Tocqueville claimed to have found in America the country in which sexual standards were stricter than in any other. He attributed this severity in part, and rather obviously, to the Americans’ religion, and in part, and not so obviously, to the influence of democracy itself. Aristocracy’s emphasis on both class differences and parental authority, he noted, limits one’s choice of partner and, by thus divorcing personal inclination from marital commitment, leads naturally to the prevalence of and sympathy for sexual irregularity. On the other hand, in a democracy, where one can marry according to one’s choice, promiscuity and infidelity have no such excuse.
Whatever its causes, the strictness of American sexual morality continued well into the twentieth century, arguably well into the 1960s. Of course, this strictness was never universally accepted. One could always find libertines, especially among the wealthy and famous, who possessed the means and the leisure to indulge a sexually free-wheeling lifestyle. But the severity Tocqueville marked was always general, that is, embraced by dominant, not to say overwhelming, social opinion.
Carson Holloway is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and the author of a book on Darwinism and political theory from Spence Publishing.
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