“It had the biggest head you ever saw, Christopher Robin. A great enormous thing, like — like nothing. A huge big — well, like a — I don’t know — like an enormous big nothing.” – A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh
Poor Piglet had of course never seen a heffalump, in fact had never even heard of a heffalump until Pooh started to talk about catching one. And since Piglet was a rather timid and easily frightened creature, it should come as no surprise to anyone that after staying up half the night thinking about heffalumps and worrying about whether they might be fierce, that he should conclude that the first unidentified thing he saw the next morning was a heffalump and react with predictable hysteria.
We have become a nation of Piglets obsessing over a heffalump named “pedophilia”. Pedophilia is defined as sexual attraction to prepubescent children, but since the Cult of the Child insists on willfully confusing the legal concept of a “minor” with the biological concept of a “child”, many modern Piglets have concluded that sexual attraction to fully-developed women who happen to be under the age of legal majority is somehow “pedophilia”. And since they know absolutely no real facts about this heffalump, it should come as no surprise that after worrying about it for two decades they tend to conclude that anything which bears even a passing resemblance to attraction to a person under 18 must be real, dyed-in-the-wool pedophilia, and they react with predictable hysteria.
Here’s the most recent example, paraphrased from an AP story:
Two of the good-looking young actresses who star in the popular television show Glee inadvertently provoked controversy this week by appearing in a suggestive photo spread in the November issue of GQ. Though the actresses are in their twenties and the magazine is intended for adult men, some critics and fans of the show are upset because many children watch the show and the actresses portray high-school students in it; furthermore, the photos show them in a high-school locker room setting and one shows the actress licking a lollipop. Glee stars Lea Michele (who plays “Rachel” on the show) and Dianna Agron (who plays a cheerleader named “Quinn”) appeared clad only in skimpy panties, and though Cory Monteith (the quarterback “Finn”) appears as well he remains fully clothed.
“I just wasn’t impressed at all,” said a disapproving Emily Martin, a mother in Ontario, Canada. “I guess I just don’t understand why they chose to even pose for these photos in the first place,” Martin wrote in an e-mail message. “I don’t get what they hope to gain by putting themselves out there like that.”
Her feelings were echoed by commentators as prominent as Katie Couric, who devoted an opinion segment on Wednesday’s CBS Evening News to the controversy. “I’m a Gleek,” she began, saying that she and her 14-year-old daughter watch the show every week. But she decried the photos, particularly Michele’s spread-eagle one, as “raunchy” and “un-Glee-like,” and concluded: “I’m disappointed.”
“Utterly tone-deaf,” chimed in Salon.com. “An explosion of cliched fetishism not seen outside the cheap Halloween costume aisles,” wrote EW.com. Unsurprisingly, the harshest commentary came from the Parents Television Council: “It borders on pedophilia,” said its president, Tim Winter. He called the spread a “near-pornographic display” — especially the “full-frontal crotch shot.”
Though GQ will obviously profit from the publicity, editor in chief Jim Nelson took issue with the pedophilia reference, pointing out that Agron and Michele are 24, and Monteith is 28; “I think they’re old enough to do what they want,” he said. In an e-mail to The Associated Press, he elaborated: “I don’t think it will surprise anyone that we knew what we were doing,” he wrote. “I think most people will take the pictures with the wink and spirit of fun in which they were made…What we wanted to celebrate in the shoot and the story is (the show’s) playfulness, its wicked sense of fun, the clever way it plays with its self-awareness. And it doesn’t hide from its sexual suggestiveness.”
Nelson is unquestionably correct; Glee, which airs Tuesdays at 8 p.m. Eastern on the Fox network, frequently deals with mature themes such as teen pregnancy, homosexuality and the loss of virginity. Nor is it any stranger to controversy; some parents took issue last season at a scene in which Monteith’s character Finn ejaculated in a hot tub, and this season there was a lesbian love scene between two cheerleader characters in which one of them referred specifically to a more intimate sex act.
Yet, inattentive parents allow children as young as 8 or 9 to watch the show; kids are apparently drawn in by its energetic musical numbers. If one had any doubt as to the youthfulness of the fan base, he need only have witnessed the legions of squealing “tweens” at last spring’s Glee concert tour. The show’s creators didn’t quite expect that at first; “We didn’t know 9-year-olds would like it so much,” co-creator and executive producer Brad Falchuk told the AP in May. “We didn’t know the geriatric set would like it so much, either. I wish we knew how we did it.”
It wasn’t clear how the show’s producers felt about the GQ photos: Fox denied the AP’s request for comment. Jim Nelson said that Fox knew about the shoot, but didn’t get involved; “It was up to the individual actors and the reps for the actors to approve the concept,” he said. A publicist for Michele did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the actress, who is the breakout star of Glee and the subject of the raciest GQ photos — the one with spread legs, and the lollipop-licking photo. Nor did a representative for Monteith.
A publicist for Agron would only confirm the authenticity of a posting by the actress on tumblr.com: The photos, she said, “do not represent who I am…They asked us to play very heightened versions of our school characters,” wrote Agron, whose poses weren’t nearly as explicit as Michele’s, but still had her in tiny schoolgirl skirts intentionally raised up. “At the time, it wasn’t my favorite idea, but I did not walk away…If you are hurt or these photos make you uncomfortable, it was never our intention,” she said. “And if your 8-year-old has a copy of our GQ cover in hand, again I am sorry. But I would have to ask, how on earth did it get there?”
At least one parent interviewed for this article agreed with Agron that it was the parent’s responsibility to control what children see. “Parents need to filter what comes into their house,” said Vivian Manning-Schaffel, a 42-year-old mother of two in New York City and a frequent blogger on parenting issues. “It’s up to parents to be clear about what is what.” About the GQ photos, she added: “I don’t understand what all the hoopla is about. If I were those actresses, I’d be out there posing in those outfits myself! They’re both gorgeous.”
Celebrity editor Bonnie Fuller also came to the actresses’ defense. “They are entitled to promote their careers as they see fit,” Fuller wrote on her website, Hollywood Life. “Whether you like it or not, posing in sexually suggestive photographs has become a staple for actresses and actors to self-promote,” she wrote. “They almost all do it.”
I think it’s obvious that actresses aren’t responsible for lazy parents letting their kids watch inappropriate shows, and that 9-year-olds don’t read GQ; once again we’re faced with the bizarre catechism of the Cult of the Child, which holds that since these actresses did something “dirty” their mere images will somehow destroy the “innocence” of children who watch their show. But it even goes beyond that to something even more mind-bogglingly stupid: “It borders on pedophilia,” said Tim Winter, president of the Parents Television Council. What???? How in Aphrodite’s name does a photo shoot featuring two ADULT actresses portraying biologically adult characters “border” on pedophilia? So if one of them put on a necktie and a man’s hat, would Mr. Winter claim it “bordered on homosexuality?” If they dressed as Playboy bunnies, would he claim it “bordered on bestiality?” Perhaps one of them could slip in a pair of cheesy plastic vampire fangs so Mr. Winter and his fellow cultists could proclaim it “bordered on necrophilia!”
This is utterly insane; these people have now fetishized children to the point where even semi-nude pictures of adults playing legal minors constitutes “pedophilia”? I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, considering that nude drawings of children, sexual descriptions of fictional children and even depictions of cartoon characters having sex have resulted in their possessors being jailed for “child pornography” or “obscenity”. And if adult prostitutes can somehow be defined as “trafficked children”, then certainly adult actresses can be defined as “children” too. How much longer must we endure this evil nonsense before it finally burns itself out and reveals this dire threat to civilization as nothing but an empty jar?
When the movie “An Education” was released it was scary the number of people who felt that a man of thirty something was a pedophile for having a relationship with a 16 year old girl. When it was pointed out that it was based on a true story and that in the 1960s such a relationship was quite normal the response was that it shouldn’t have been – it just went to show how ignorant people were at that time about the dangers of pedophilia!
Today in the UK it has become very difficult to photograph in public places since if there are children around then any adult with them is convinced that the real aim of the photographer is to take pictures for pedophilic purposes.
In schools parents are no longer allowed to photograph/video their children in plays or at sports events because other parents object on the grounds that these pictures may show up on pedophile websites.
“Those whom the gods destroy they first make mad.” (or something to that effect)
The idea that photography or videography of fully-clothed children involved in normal activities should be prohibited on the grounds that pedophiles might be aroused by it is exactly the same mentality which justifies the fundamentalist Muslim belief that women must cover their bodies and faces in all-concealing garments in order to prevent men from being aroused by them.
It is impossible to protect everyone from everything, and abusive insanity to even attempt it. 🙁
A few years ago, a guy was filiming a pep rally and sold copies of the video on his website. He was charged with fostering peddophilia or some such idiotic crime for selling a video he had made of cheerleaders doing cheers in a public place where probably hundreds of other people were filming the exact same event. That’s on roughly the same level as this Glee idiocy. For the record, at ages 18 and 19, I dated and had sex with girls who were 16 and 17. I wonder if some idiot would consider me a pedophile for that.
When I was 15 I was having sex with 18-year-olds and when I was 16 I had a couple of guys in their 20s. I guess they were “pedophiles” as well, even though I was never carded because everyone thought I was about 25. 🙁
Great commentary. If I may offer a minor correction: the hysteria over child sexual abuse has been around for 30 years, not 20. The quotes from concerned parents, etc. are typical of our current cultural tragedy: superifical but politically correct opinions are counted carefully, since the truth is a matter of popular vote.
But let’s not confuse sex hysteria with excessive concern for children’s health and safety. The witch hunt for pedophiles has nothing to do with protecting children.
Approximately 3-4 children die every year at the hands of sexual psychopaths (popularly called “pedophiles” to sound new and mysterious), compared to the 10,000+ child fatalities every year due to physical abuse and neglect covered up as “accidents.”
Hundreds of thousands of children suffer crippling physical injuries at the hands of their parents and other caregivers every year, not to mention the millions of little girls mentally castrated under the banner of “sexual inhibition.”
Prudes try to exploit the realtively rare problem of “pedophilia” to promote their primitive agenda of religiously-based political correctness. Suppress accurate, balanced and comprehensive sex education at all costs, and deny children any form of education that enables them to think independently, since preserving ancient dogma and traditional parental authority is their real goal.
Thank you, Frank! I welcome corrections from well-informed people who want to get the facts straight, and I know you’re correct about thirty years being a better figure than twenty because now that I think of it I clearly remember it started in earnest right after a TV movie called Something About Amelia, and it obviously was at least beginning before that or else the movie wouldn’t have been made!
I agree that it’s tragic that so much attention, time and money is diverted to rare but titillating problems while large ones which do not evoke prurient interest are ignored; we prostitutes often discuss the money wasted on persecuting us and our customers which could be better spent on dealing with actual criminals. 🙁
Another creepy thing about this pedophilia* is that it is the fear, more than the pedophiles themselves, that is sexualizing children. Any photograph of any child is now scrutinized to see if it might in some way be erotic. People who would normally not see children in any sexual way now immediately try to see through the eyes of a pedophile, and ask if the seven-year-old is “provocatively posed.”
The GQ ,Glee thing is about infantalizing teens and adults; the situation about not recording Little League is about sexualizing children. When both happen at the same time, it just can’t lead to anything good.
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/ilaw/Speech/Adler_full.html
No! Tell me it ain’t so! I can’t believe Katie Couric would jump on the sex hysteria bandwagon. Just kidding. Actually, I don’t see her as being much different from Dan Rather except she still has some credibility with those who still give network news anchors the benefit of the doubt until they are actually caught red handed faking the news (as was Dan Rather, of course).
Good post. I was recently reading a so-called scientific study of adolescent prostitution that defined ‘adolescent’ as anyone up to age 22. It helps inflate the stats when you can broaden the definition of trivial things like age group, work description, and what constitutes exploitation (not that truth is a big consideration for anti prostitution crusaders).
While we’re at it let’s just redefine “fetus” to include anyone up to 10, so if kids turn out to be brats we can legally “abort” them. 🙁
Why stop at 10? I’d be all for raising the age to 18 for abortions. I think it would wonderful great disciplinary leverage.
Why not? There are plenty of people who seem to believe that at the exact moment a person turns eighteen that the person, like Billy Batson, is magically transformed from ALL CHILD into ALL ADULT. Transforming from ALL FETUS should only take a little bit more magic.
Let’s change the definition of “adolescence” to include eighty-year-olds. Then we can quake at the sudden spike in “teenage Alzheimer’s.”
LOL!
It seems like nobody wants to ‘fess up that teenage-hood is the most intensely sexual time in almost anyone’s life (who was never sucked into the all encoumpassing vortex of hormones? not you? too bad!). Pretending that teens aren’t sexual until they’re 18 (22?!) is crazy to me but explains why sex ed is still about avoiding pregnancy and not about how to have decent sex.
Using words like “pedophilia” to describe age gaps is like using the word ‘addiction’ to describe anything that someone does and doesn’t want to stop. It makes things not true which then makes these things, as arguments, stupid and useless and fraught, simply fraught with emotional knee-jerkism.
I know that this is a very thick filter I need to wade through when I’m talking about sex trade to the general populous.
What most amazes me most about the pretense that teenage sexuality is somehow pathological is the fact that literally EVERYONE who says such things knows better; they’ve all (including doctors, psychologists, etc) just agreed on this ridiculous fiction, and those who refuse to espouse it are shouted down or labelled “pedophiles”. 🙁
Part of the problem is that those who think about ‘the children’ when they forbid something (sexual contacts, exposition to sexual material, etc.) are thinking of 5-, 6-year olds, and forget that the laws are such that 15, 16, 17-year olds are also often included. There is a lot of difference between 5-year-olds and 15-year-olds.
On the other hand, where do we draw the line? one might ask. At 14? 13? 12? 10? At what age is it a bad idea for you to have sex with someone? (My 8-year-old daughter is clearly already a sexual being, which doesn’t mean I think it would be a good idea for her to actually have sex with someone.)
The fact is that we can’t really find the “best” invisible line to separate (sexual) childhood from adulthood, because different people cross it at different ages (and some cross it more slowly than others — it’s not really a line, it’s more like a staircase…).
Nature already gave us a line; it’s called “puberty”. In American law there is a false duality of “child/adult” imposed over the actual five-way division nature uses (child/adolescent/young adult/adult/older adult).
Be careful pointing out that five is not fifteen and fifteen is not five. It’ll get you labeled “a pedo-perve.” Well, at least on some message boards.
Of course you’re right, but hey.
A couple of late thoughts:
–”We didn’t know the geriatric set would like it so much, either. I wish we knew how we did it.”
Well, a couple of sexy 20-somethings in short skirts will bring the geriatric set around every time.
–The Boomtown Rats song “Mary of the 4th Form” was out in, what, 1977? Geldof beat Sting’s “Don’t Stand So Close To Me” by three years.
Sittin’ in the front row Mary of the fourth form
Turnin’ all the boys down She’s turnin’ all their heads around
Hitchin’ up her short skirt Stretchin’ out her long legs
Pullin’ up her stockings She’s combing out her black hair
Starin’ at the teacher Openin’ her lips wide
Shiftin’ in her seat. Yeah, She slowly moves her hips aside
I think Mary might have been a senior when I was a freshman. 😉
–Above all, thank you, thank you, thank you. I will bookmark this post specifically, and whenever some hypermoral moron starts prating about “pedophilia” when referring to a biologically adult female who just happens to be under 18, I will come back and read it. And then keep my mouth shut, because I don’t need to be arrested, especially with kids in high school. Daughters. With hot friends.
Nieces. With hot friends. Welcome to the boat.
I’m going to have to check out that song.
Oh, yeah. Anything by the Rats is worth a listen, but that one is among their best. 😉
Compounding the “ado about nothing” is the sensationalizing media’s inexcusable ignorance of, indiscriminate usage of, and/or deliberate exploitation of the popular misunderstanding of, the term “pedophile”.
Technically, “PEDOphilia” involves PRE-pubescents — meaning, children under age 11 (or under 12, or under 13, depending on some variables).
Two other, separate, terms apply to pubescents, whom local laws/customs may classify as minors/under-the-age-of-consent:
“HEBEphilia”, which involves 11 to 14 year-olds;
“EPHEBOphilia”, which involves 15 to 19 year-olds.
The media typically makes little to no effort to distinguish ages by using these three terms, choosing — and I emphasize CHOOSING, since journalists are by default expected to address facts so are guilty at minimum of ineptitude and negligence if they don’t — choosing to employ a generic, lump-all usage for “pedophilia”.
The media’s reporting not only fails to prevent the public from presuming the worst whenever someone is involved with a minor; but their avoidable ambiguity actively incites public hysteria by exploiting popular misconceptions of the word “pedophile” Journalists are choosing wording that implies all (alleged!) “offenders” are preying upon PRE-pubescent children.
Thank you. It needs to be said, often and by many.
Come to think, Sailor — if the pedophilia hysteria of today had been the media fodder of the 1950s and 60s, imagine the accusations that would have been hurled against Chuck Berry (“Sweet Little Sixteen”), Johnny Burnette (“You’re Sixteen”), Luther Dixon and the Crests (“Sixteen Candles”), and Paul McCartney and the Beatles (“I Saw Her Standing There”‘ with its lyrics, “Well, she was just seventeen/You know what I mean”), who, except for possibly all the Crests, were all well past age 19 when those hits were recorded.
Donny Osmond was about fourteen when he sang “Go Away Little Girl,” and that might be enough to doom him today. Originally, the song was recorded by Bobby Vee, who was about 19, and later the same year by Steve Lawrence, who was 27. Somebody call the cops!
Yeah…and Gary Puckett and the Union Gap would be made out to be demon-possessed for “Young Girl”. Or, would that song be adopted as the pedophilia-hysterics’ official anthem?
It’d all be laughable if it wasn’t so pathetic.
I remember the hysteria about pedophilia, along with ancillary things like children being abducted by strangers, started just a year or two after I graduated college in 1983.