Our alarm at abuse through camera lenses is a clear instance of the way we substitute a trivial problem for a perilous one. It is also a clear instance of the confusion that drives us to do just that. We seem so obsessed by the need to distinguish sharply between kids and eroticism that we inevitably stir them together; meaning to put them in separate rooms, we provide secret passageways so they can visit. We say so often and loudly that there's nothing erotic about kids that we cement the association.
We are so obsessed by the bodies of children and are so devoted to protecting those bodies that we construct a world where very nearly everyone (but us) is driven wild by the sight of a child. Though we treat people who are sexually aroused by children as monsters possessed by feelings altogether unknown to the rest of us, we also act as if they were everywhere.
We like to say that the child pornography business is enormous, a multibillion-dollar industry; that the Internet is crawling with pedophiles distributing kiddie porn as they go; that millions of children are sexually molested by adults.
624.jpg)
At the same time, we act as though these predators are not of us, are none of us, are as unknowable and rare as werewolves. Pedophiles are everywhere and nowhere, common and freakish; above all, they act as scapegoats for our own confused desires. We enter into heated mock battles with them at the oddest places: day-care centers, Satanic sites, schoolrooms and now photo labs.
We would not find ourselves in the midst of such a collective mess if we did not, on many levels, collectively want to be there. We all gain from sideshows like photo lab stings. And what we gain is immunity from thinking our own feelings. If we blame others loudly enough, we need not look at our own hearts and desires. It is a Gothic world we create with simple villains (the pedophiles) and equally simple rescuers (us).
Jock Sturges, the art photographer who has spent years in court for his photographs of children, analyzes all this very clearly for us: "I had to pretend to be something that, quite frankly, I'm probably not, which is a lily-white, absolutely artistically pure human being. In fact, I don't believe I'm guilty of any crimes, but I've always been drawn to and fascinated by physical, sexual and psychological change, and there's an erotic aspect to that. It would be disingenuous of me to say there wasn't."
So shines an honest man in a weary world. We all should be drawn to and fascinated by the beautiful and the arresting, including beautiful and arresting children, without being terrified by the erotic aspect in our fascination. Admitting to an erotic attraction is not the same thing as admitting to rape or assault: We do not commonly attack what we love and we do not feel the need to act on every impulse. Finding something erotic does not drive us irresistibly to mount it. We could use more complexity in our thinking on this subject, more tolerance for difficulty. And a lot more honesty.
The price we allow our children to pay for our scapegoating cowardice is enormous. Our kids, caught in the middle of all this, don't mind our snapping lenses, but they do mind the ghastly world we picture for them. It is a world filled with dangers around every curve, with safety only in non-pedophilic adults and our friends, the police. We ought to examine more searchingly if we are really doing all this for their good, if we really need to see the world this way, if we aren't the ones afraid of the demons. Especially the demons inside us.