How splendid that the Mothers' Unions should launch its campaign against padded bras and pole-dancing kits for children on the same day as Ian Hislop's series on the Victorian social reformers reached the great anti-capitalist campaigners for child welfare.
The biggest sexual abuse of children in the West today is Internet pornography, and the "free" market's general pornographication of our culture. It constitutes direct, sustained, commercial and supremely serious sexual violence against, in particular, teenage boys. Those who want to know what the Pope thinks of it need only consult the Catechism. But what say:
- Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt, who ran the National Council for Civil Liberties when it was passing resolutions in support of the Paedophile Information Exchange and Paedophile Action for Liberation, and when it was publishing calls to legalise and destigmatise sex between adults and children?
- Stephen Fry, author of The Liar and The Hippopotamus, both of which glorify sex between men and teenage boys, exactly the acts that have brought scandal on the Catholic Church?
- successive Chairmen and Controllers of Channel Four, in its dramatic output a relentless, publicly owned campaigner in favour of such acts?
- Germaine Greer, author of The Boy, a book-length celebration of the sexual fetishisation of the adolescent male by both men and women?
- Richard Dawkins, who in The God Delusion describes having been sexually abused as a child as "an embarrassing but otherwise harmless experience"?
- Philip Pullman, whose famous trilogy concludes with sexual intercourse between two children aged about 12, and who has repeatedly denounced the absence of sexual content in the Narnia novels?
- the numerous Social Services Departments that ran homes in which, at the same time as the Church was hushing up sex between men and teenage boys on the part of a small number of priests - and thus, however imperfectly, indicating disapproval of it - such behaviour was absolutely endemic, with major figures in that world publishing academic studies, used for many years in the training of social workers, which presented it as positively beneficial to both parties and therefore actively to be encouraged? and
- the Police, who long ago stopped enforcing the age of consent from 13 upwards; as with their non-enforcement of the drugs laws, one really does have to ask for whose benefit that is?
Among many, many, many others.
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"Philip Pullman, whose famous trilogy concludes with sexual intercourse between two children aged about 12, and who has repeatedly denounced the absence of sexual content in the Narnia novels?"
ReplyDeleteI seem to recall that bit being a bit vague.
"Philip Pullman, whose famous trilogy concludes with sexual intercourse between two children aged about 12"
ReplyDeleteNo it doesn't. I read it again recently. At no point do the two children have sex. We "see" them kiss each other: then the narrative cuts to them waking up the next morning fully clothed. Any sex that happens is strictly in the reader's imagination. Which makes it interesting that so many people jump to that conclusion.
I have repeatedly been told, as if I did not already know it, "Will and Lyra touch each other's 'daemons' as a mark of love." Well, is that what they are calling it these days?
ReplyDeletePullman's 'daemons' physicalise processes that are primarily emotional. This extends to many other interactions in Pullman's world: persuasion, seduction, lying, betrayal, befriending. And it is very clever and effective, in that it allows extended expression of the psychological and emotional by means of physical vocabulary.
However, precisely because this makes it far easier for younger readers who may not have the capacity or inclination to follow more sophisticated and difficult expressions of persons' inner lives, what of those younger readers or, now, viewers who have no 'daemons' with which to physicalise the primarily emotional process of being in love? What are they supposed to do in response to this literature?
We know the answer to that one, since Pullman himself has repeatedly denounced the absence of sexual content in the Narnia novels: sexualisation is even higher on his agenda than is secularisation, of which his obsession with Christianity is in any case a standing contradiction.
Is it back to this that future generations are to look nostalgically when recalling the formative books of childhood? Indeed, are Pullman's pubescent readers today to emulate this behaviour?
Whatever else a Catholic priest who has sex with a teenage boy might be doing, he is certainly breaking the Teaching of the Church. He would not, however, appear to be breaking the teaching of Philip Pullman.
Pullman clearly implies that they have sex. He presents it as an entrance into adulthood where they throw off the innocence of childhood. Pullman hates innocence. Mary the former nun temps them with her story of breaking her vows. All those allusions to marzipan. Marzipan means sex.
ReplyDelete"I have repeatedly been told, as if I did not already know it, "Will and Lyra touch each other's 'daemons' as a mark of love." Well, is that what they are calling it these days?"
ReplyDeleteAh, so you're saying that the physical action of the daemons was an analogue for a physical actions of the humans?
"Pullman's 'daemons' physicalise processes that are primarily emotional."
No, you're not. The daemons' actions are metaphors for emotions. As you say. So when they touch it is not a metaphor for sex (an action) but for love (a feeling).
Also, I have to tell you that among people of all ages the impulse to physicalise the emotional process of being in love has been present since long before Pullman put pen to paper. Reading about a monkey stroking a chaffinch is not going to be the crucial factor here.