The Child In Distress

Parents and professionals who continue to fall prey to cheap tabloid journalism have learned nothing from the childhood tale of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf." In the "child in distress" narrative perpetuated in our culture, children are constantly prey to whatever new scary apparition appears on the horizon, and everything must be sacrificed to keep them safe from the next "flying inevitable". One can scarcely go through ten minutes of media without being bombarded by a child in distress. This repetitive narrative of the child in distress, however, only drives the same psychological niche for adults as the "damsel in distress" once did for the chauvenist culture, and is just as flimsy a vehicle.

Being concerned about the actual hazards a child may immediately encounter is crucial to human survival, but we seem to think being afraid of the foretold but non-existent "wolves in the fold" has something to do with it as well. It doesn't. It's a justification we created for ourselves. In general, those who are in their own minds powerful like to perpetuate fantasies of their own usefulness, stemming from arrogance. It doesn't matter who that powerful source is or whether that usefulness is needed, natural, or man-made. For adults, that fantasy manifests itself when we make ourselves feel useful for slaying the demons in our own heads out to possess our children (which probably don't pose any immediate threat to justify such a reaction), regardless of whether such a crusade is actually useful. 

It is hardly a revelation, as Nietzsche and Rousseau described the arrogant fantasy of the powerful in terms of social class in the 19th century, and Mill and Wollstonecraft in terms of indefensible sexism in the 19th and 18th century respectively. But I equivocate it now toward all adults who still maintain this ideology of superiority over all age groups below them despite hundreds of years of evolution on the "dignity of difference" between class, race, and sex. Why the feminists in particular ignored the similarity between the "child" and "damsel" "distress narratives" when they hurled criticism at the old self-serving male fantasy only speaks volumes about the limits of feminist critique. After all, women are adults too, and are served by the repetition of the "child in distress" narrative just as much as men are, if not more.

Instead, the myth of some "age determinism" of superiority and inferiority continues without reproach, with the justification that children ought to aspire to the adult example and adults ought to aspire to the child's. It is just assumed, by adults first and then by children, that this is a beneficial co-dependence between the age groups and that it is necessary, but it is neither. It's not instinct. It's in fact a self-serving ideology on behalf of those who created it--the powerful, the adults. It is created out of adult-centric culture. 

It's easy to see how superiority theories like this breed only inter-group contempt. While aspiring to the adult example as they are expected, children are taught to despise their childish nature, and while aspiring to the child's "innocence" as they are expected, adults are taught to despise their "adultish" nature. Neither is expected to appreciate who and what they are at either end of the developmental timeline, and they take their induced self-loathing out on the other group, be them perceived as superior or inferior. Sentimental sloganeering is constantly depicting children as "wide eyed" and "innocent," and proposing that if only adults could be like that, all our world dilemmas could be solved. While this is hardly convincing, it is pervasive, because adults and children alike will naturally seek out the positive traits of the other for their own sake, and condemn the negative traits of their opponent for their opponent's sake.

So I don't like to ever say one group is better than another group, because typically the group that assumes it is better is only better because it alone set the standard by which "betterness" is tested. Adults have always been powerful. They've always set the standards by which betterness is tested, so by their might alone, they are superior. And what have they done with their power? They've declared that only they are capable of using the power they've granted to themselves, and they remind themselves of this by reproducing the child in distress narrative.

But does not assuming that children are capable threaten to become an even worse imposition on children than assuming that they are incapable? After all, children and adults are different, you say, and wouldn't imposing the adult world onto children be just as bad as imposing the will of adults over them onto them? That kind of thinking, while overtly condemning ageist imposition, further establishes systemic ageist inequality. It is like dropping a weight down on one of two otherwise "conceptually" equal scales. To justify legitimate differences, the two must be given two different narratives? That only works when you can be sure you're not inadvertently disenfranchising one's differences and advantaging the other's in your distress narrative. 

Educator John Holt, in Escape From Childhood, wrote on how the assumption of capability in children only opens the doors for those who can, and does nothing to impose on those who can't or won't, so long as the initiative is voluntarily entered into. Right now, children are automatically involuntarily entered into the narrative as pawns in the adult's innocence game, and are thus stripped of their dignity as women once were, and rendered involuntarily defenseless despite their abilities. What in the chauvinist narrative, as it existed, advantaged a woman's dignity? And if you can't answer, ask yourself, what in the adult narrative of the "child in distress," as it exists now, advantages children? The answer is nothing at worse, or a negligible advantage at best, as perhaps one could argue that the "child in distress" narrative "motivates" adults to care about children. But the assumption of their inability affects every child through repression by its involuntary imposition still, while the assumption of a child's potential only affects those who rise to the occasion through voluntary inclusion, and in doing such, is not repression.

Because the adult narrative often disenfranchises youth and solely advantages adults (as it exists for their benefit), it shouldn't be tolerated as the sole paradigm. The narrative should only be justified when the inequalities between the age groups, or gender groups, or race groups, don't "consistently" manifest themselves along traditional power differentials. If the child is "always" the disenfranchised one, the meek one, the one being saved, when positioned in the distress narrative, and the adult is always the one in control, always the one doing the saving, then it is unjust inequality being represented. Likewise it would also would be unjust inequality if, all things being equal, it was assumed that only black children did poorly in school and had to be rescued by whites, or if it was assumed that only women become jeopardized and need to be rescued by men.

Unjust inequality is the imbalance between groups that exists due to human assumption rather than natural occurrence. It is one thing for natural inequalities to present themselves--for a black child to do poorly, for a girl to do poorly, or for a child to be controlled by an adult--but if any of those are the only paradigm ever shown, then one group is being unfairly advantaged while another group is being disenfranchised consistently. Individual variation is a good measure of natural inequality. If individuals vary from person to person, then all are equally being served and all are varying in their response. If a whole swath of people aren't being served to begin with, then there is no variation, just one group advantaging while another group is disenfranchised. That is not an acceptable "difference."

But adults have more self control, you say, and better cognitive skills, and superior strength. Should not adults take the initiative to rescue the weaklings? Of course they should, but only because it is intuitive that those who are strong look out for and protect those who are weak, and not simply because they are adults. If a child or young person happens to be strong and capable enough to take the initiative, why deny them only for not being old enough? To continue to misrepresent strong and capable young people as meek and defenseless only implies that one favors infantilizing them, and all the repercussions that causes, over empowering them, and all the benefits of that.

After all, it's not about believing one group is better than another group, it's about recognizing the differences between the two and affording them respective to their individual ability. The weakness of the adult narrative is that it ignores the possibility that capability is a human trait that everyone possesses to some degree, and instead tries to claim "capability" as its own entirely, and therefore the term "humanity" as well. There is nothing wrong with an adult taking initiative for a child in distress, so long as we recognize that there's also nothing wrong with a child taking responsibility for another child in distress, or an adult in distress, if they are capable of doing so, and we should depict all scenarios accordingly.

The question becomes whether or not children benefit from the adult narrative of "the child in distress," or if they are just the recipients of neutral, natural circumstances. Perhaps adults are inspired in some way from the repetition of the narrative to nurture their children, but even still, this isn't a satisfactory motivation. The best display of the adult's weakness is their need to justify their position of unquestionable authority (their so-called "maturity") by fantasizing about distressed and endangered children. If adults were truly matured, they would feel the requirement and responsibility to nurture the young the young people's sake, without having to resort to storytelling cliches that serve only their personal sense of pride, and ego.

On Pedophilia

Pedo-erotic urges exist in everyone to varying degrees, often subconscious or not strong enough to elicit our attention, but existing nonetheless. It's pretty clear there may even be an evolutionary basis for pedophilia--that men have it in abundance because they need to be attracted to "younger" females who are more fertile for child-rearing--and that we've understood this for a long time without calling it what it is. It's highly likely that if women have a pedophilia strain in them, it's in regards to child-rearing itself. And since there is very little outward distinction in sex physicality between boys and girls, pedophilia may even express itself in contrast to the traditional Kinsey scale of sexual orientation. In any case, we need not feel dirty for this underlying desire so long as we understand the difference between attraction and self control.

Self control may not be something our modern society expects from us as it constantly seeks to cripple our sexual resolve for profit, but it is important for all of us to maintain, pedophile or not. Pedophilia is as human as anything else, for better or for worse, so we need to understand that people only become child molesters when they break the law, regardless of whether they were pedophiles or not. After all, any child who has ever had a crush or an infatuation or attraction to another child below the legal limit is a "pedophile" too, perhaps not clinically, but socially. And that goes for everyone, of every sexuality.

Much of what we call pedophilia in a "clinical" sense though might simply be an untimely pairing of biological directives and modern cultural norms. In the modern world, artificial age limitations have no relation to the biological time clocks we used to observe, when puberty was the final hurdle for procreation. Times may have changed, but kids are still biologically capable of reproducing after puberty. It's a fact of nature, no matter how inconvenient it may be to our modern sensibilities. Wait a while and our sensibilities may change again.

But while the scathing vitriol regarding pedophilia is allowed to rage unmitigated, how rational are the sensibilities we actually defend? That old-time "final hurdle" of sexual cognizance is creeping toward the middle-aged and upwards, where people often have to resort to costly medications to even achieve arousal. And as if to compensate, we add further insult to nature by denying even the existence of child and adolescent sexuality when it is biologically in its prime. Youth can't participate legally because we keep them from knowing the rules socially, so this creates an ecological situation perfect for child sexual exploitation to thrive.

It's simply unnatural to bear children as relatively late in life as we do, but we do it because that time period tends to be more stable and secure for child-rearing in our middle-class culture. It's also simply unnatural to deny all children and adolescents their sexual cognizance, but we do it because we want to maintain their ignorance and prolong their potential victimization, which serves us as adults. We subjugate youth by forcing their abstinence and dehumanize them by re-classing their biological drives as dangerous promiscuity, and we do it because we want to punish the rapists among us--the adults. And since "no punishment is enough" for the adults who commit these crimes, the only ones who end up adequately paying the price for the adult evils are the children themselves, once they too step over the line with other kids. There are just as many 5 year old sex offenders as there are 55 year old sex offenders*. There is no distinction.

And our sentiments remain intact, and so does every child's ignorance. Rape and biology go together better than rape and morality, and we let morality dictate what is biological now. We seem to think that because the worst among us might rape children, all children must be subject to forcible abstinence under penalty of law. So once suppressed in our youth, our immoral biology then continues to ride under the surface of our so-called "civilized" appetites. I'd even take it a step further and say that so much of what we consider to be female sexual objectification is actually very childish in appearance. The modern idealized female form, with its emphasis on smooth skin, thin limbs, and wide eyes, is an attempt to transplant the features of a child into those of a legally and culturally acceptable adult.

And as to the sexual preference for youth and its appropriateness by itself (outside its connection to molestation), where do those standards originate anyways? The same society that actively encourages our sexual attraction to automobiles, food, alcohol, and any object that can be bought and sold, is then going to tell us what sexual attractions are "unnatural?" Just compare one unnatural urge with another one. Our culture is still youth-based, otherwise our economy would hinge on the attractiveness of saggy, middle-aged adults. Even as much as the middle-aged, middle-class adults would like to think this is the case, it is not.

How many times in suggestive advertising have you seen a woman with batted eyes and a finger to her lips in that "opps, silly me" stance? Is that not childish in appearance  Is that not what Nabokov might have called, the "nymphet" amok in the eye? In general, the whole "cute kid" gimmick in films and advertising speaks to these underlying desires en mass. "Cute" and "sexy" stimulate the same pleasure centers of the brain biochemically, as do psychoactive substances and food. The whole practice of schoolmasters flogging kids on the ass was a highly sexually charged release of the adult's pent up aggression, and many still swear by it, so is that not clinical pleasure seeking? Afterall, is not rape more concerned with conquest than sexuality? Do typical adults not dream of child conquest as they go about their business with children in tow?

Of course they do, they just don't realize that it is a desire one and the same with that of child molesters--the only difference being that child molesters actually do what the typical adult only dreams of doing. One doesn't have to be a pedophile to harm children or to dream of doing it, but anyone who actually does harm a child sexually is automatically branded one. Rape is an atrocity no matter where it crops up and who the victim or perpetrator is or what their sexuality is, but rape can and does exist contrary to sexuality, and outside of pedophilia people understand this. Pedophilia is an attraction, rape is a loss of self control. Child molestation exists whether pedophilia does or not, and likewise. Child molestation is solely a product of  a weak resolve, and still pedophilia exists whether or not self control is present.

This is also true when speaking about the popular assumption of a pedophile's weak self control, and where that expectation actually originates. Heterosexuals have the luxury of being able to express their sexuality freely and openly. They grow accustomed to doing it and assume it is the same for everyone, but it isn't. They make the conclusion that repressed sexual feelings will inevitably lead to harmful consequences, but it isn't necessarily so. Fringe sexualities with a sound mind actually have to learn self control in more constant, realistic terms, so they may actually have a higher degree of it than their "normal" peers, who are accustomed to building erections at the sight of beer bottles and automobiles. If most straight men don't rape feminine-shaped cars or curvy bottles, then it's possible even fewer "pedophiles" rape children.

Those who do though, are deserving of the worst.

* United States Bureau of Justice Statistics. (2000). Sexual Assault of Young Children as Reported to Law Enforcement. 8 (Figure 6). Retrieved July 19, 2012.

Hating Kids is Child Molestation

Think about it. Sexual molestation is an unspeakable evil, and society agrees. They take the obviously unquestionable moral tautology of detesting child sexual abuse, and then feel it justifiable that anything but outright detestation of kids is "unacceptable" on the grounds that "wanting nothing to do with them" reduces the likelihood of their abuse, or something. This means that it's actually preferable now for a man (in particular) to hate kids than to show them any compassion whatsoever, professional or otherwise, related or not, on the grounds that any compassion coming from a man to a child is a sign of inevitable sexual abuse in the works. Truth be told though, how it protects children to encourage the social disregard of them by half the adult population is beyond my reasoning capacity.

It's a weird situation of society wanting to "have its cake and eat it too." Do they want us men to hate kids or do they want us to agree child sexual abuse is wrong? Is not sex abuse predicated on harm, and harm stemming from lack of concern? If we're not supposed to show any compassion toward kids while they are unharmed, why does the presence of harm have to change those expectations? And if we're really supposed to hate kids, wouldn't it make sense that we shouldn't also care about whether they are being abused or not? See, I just get confused about what the standards are, because if it were up to me, I'd prefer to live in a world where I can wholeheartedly be against child sexual abuse and still not be expected to callously disregard that which I don't want to see come to harm.

I'd prefer to live in a world where a child's right to be nurtured by an individual was not dependent on whether society tolerates the sex of that nurturer, but that isn't the world we've allowed thus far. It happens every time the insinuation is made that the relationship of the man to a child is inevitably coercive and harmful, whether it's a professional relationship, family bond, or even a friendship. Every time that insinuation is made, even if in jest, a loving, committed adult man has convinced himself to turn away from a child in need of a role model. This is unfortunate.

Many men will go so far out of their way to prove to society that they absolutely, fundamentally, have no interest in children, that they actually start to sound more like the stereotypical child molester who only thinks about child abuse when he looks at a child. They've been scared into submission and conditioned from the time they were children themselves to withdraw, to fold at the sight of a child, to shirk them off, and now society wonders why so many do exactly that? Men are condemned for "stooping so low" as to be parents. They are harassed by paranoid bypassers when they take their own children out to the park. They are both lauded and chastised for running from their natural responsibilities so consistently and with such venom (to be undervalued when being a proper father and dismissed completely when complying with expectation not to be), that so many do run.

So many want nothing to do with children as a result, and the expectation that men are to keep a distance from every child maintains itself, spreads to the new generation, and society is content with it. They are content with depriving children their positive male role models. Our society delights in it, even if they don't recognize their own delight. They please themselves on the notion that a man can only bring harm to a child, and they seem to think the next generation ought to feel the same. It is the tyranny of the present once again over the future of mankind, and regardless of our intentions now, won't last. Bigotry never does.

Anyone, be them child molester or not, who looks upon a child and can only see the destruction of that child, is the equal of a child molester in sickness, and so is the society that holds such an expectation to begin with. The men who don't run, who don't submit to that sickness, and still do what is right for kids regardless of what anyone expects of them, are among the most commendable human beings on the planet, and unfortunately, the most under-appreciated.

An Open Appeal

An open appeal, an earnest request:

Life & Style, in the process
of harming a child.

For those who advance themselves at the expense of others in any form... for those who seek to own humanity... for those who hold one group of humans to a different standard than another for reasons having nothing to do with just desert or character... for those who lie to themselves in order to justify their own deeds... for those who work to separate humanity from its children... for those who count out a group of people from sympathy because they are "minority case" victims...

For those who peddle fear and paranoia to scapegoat and magnify the "easy targets" while protecting the real oppressors... for those who cause great unintentional harm with the best intentions... for those who devalue a human being (a man, woman, boy, or girl) only when it is socially acceptable to do it... for those who mock and ridicule the weakened man for the glory of the stronger... I see the mark of the beast on your smiling faces. Congratulations!

If you are accomplishing your directive in life by doing any of the above, then congratulations to you, antichrists of the world. Congratulations on your infamy. I laugh in the maw of your glory in our culture, for yours is the resting place of history's hell-mouth. The derision of people like you will forever be rolled across the tongues of your own progeny. Congratulations on your personal alignment with all mankind has determined to be vile and unjust. The fight for human dignity could always use a nemesis like you to make an example.

But if that is not what you desire, you who revel in any of the above, then you must turn and become purified by reason, justice, and the love of human dignity before you can be considered a person. You are not a good person in this world by your own decree, but by your works.

As damnation follows infamy, vindication follows integrity, and the choice is yours.

The Tethered Master

If only the mature people could see how incredibly childish they are. In the back of an adult's mind, they seem to know it implicitly, but always defer to the cultural expectation of the authority placed on them. The expectation they use as a catch-all justification for all age-iniquity is that the adult is limited by their responsibility, tethered by their professionalism, constrained by their worry, and tied down to the standards of conduct and pretense, and that for some reason, are and should continue to be, the masters of this planet solely by virtue of this fact.

They are slavish masters, it would seem, if that makes any sense. The one who is the most tethered, the most constrained, the most limited, is the one who grants him or herself the most unconditional respect. How much ego does it take to crown oneself master of a planet and then call children "egotistical" for claiming ownership of every toy they see? It takes the full maturity of a person's faculties to even know how to stretch logic and justification so far that even carrying a self-applied burden can somehow now become a "virtue," and yet it's what adults do every day. They anoint themselves "masters" to make themselves feel good about being slaves. It's childish human nature through and through.

They envy childhood and demean children. They go from believing fairy stories to looking down on the creatures who do, and instead grow up to indulge themselves in their own fairy stories--fairy stories of the child molester behind the face of every man, fairy stories about the constant hidden menace to their young in the world, fairy stories about the hazards of the air, the sunlight, the water, the ground below their feet, the sky above their heads, and the immanent destruction of what they love in that space. They'd sooner take their child out of that space if they were told by their cable news parents that "air" was deadly.

They're pacified by their parent media, like children, are told when to feel good, when to feel sad, and when to feel outraged at all the right parts in the fairy story, by musical cue, by expert editing--close faces, black and white, blurry images--and it works on them. They gasp, they panic, they clutch their children close and push others away at the behest of an invisible force, and all when they are told to, and all for the sake of saving themselves from the tedium of being "adult," to justify such a malignant position of authority because they know without it they would have no reason to do so.

They dread their quickening decay, their inevitable death, and in so doing decide to deny life to the young to spare them of any and all fate the same. They manufacture inhuman hardship for children in the effort to maximize their little one's comfort, convince themselves they are in the right, and then pat themselves on the back for their so-called selfless ingenuity in fleeing from the fear and guilt that rides their lives for doing it. That is the modern human adult at play--a child having his way when he's wrong.

Adults set the standards by which they judge themselves and others, and by that fact alone, are powerful. It is arrogance, but it is human. Being tethered to responsibility does not equate to virtue, as the Sword of Damocles teaches us, but an arrogant human mind in seeking to justify its doomed and slavish position of personal limitation, will ascribe to it "virtue" to save itself. Likewise, being carefree as children are said to be (which also is not the case, children are far from "care free") does not equate to its own assigned virtue. Once again, an arrogant human mind in seeking to justify the deprivation of rights and dignity to children, will ascribe to childhood the virtue of innocence, and the lack of virtue when comparing it to that of an adult's.

That is to say, an adult looks at a child's reality by way of distance and when in comparison, assigns their own reality to virtue by deeds (for them, a superior method of human appraisal, because children are supposedly deemed incapable of willful deeds), and assigns a child's to virtue by its mere existence--as one subservient, humble, and incapable of willful deeds (ie. innocence). These are not truths about either reality, but arrogant presumptions made by adult psychology. They are human, and therefore childish, things to presume. They are a part of human nature, but they are not justifiable.

Happiness

From now on, I'm going to be happy with what I have, and never seek anything more.

Entitlement and Perseverance

People say that we millennials are an entitled generation, and I think it's an accurate description. We grew up under the mantra of entitlement and saw the world at our feet, and now that we are entering the job market, still expect it to be there. We won't settle for less because we expect the most. We expect fairness, honesty, and equal opportunity, and because we are so disposed to demand such things, we are envied by those who were born having to settle for whatever they could get, and from that envy comes their damning characterizations of us. Of course not all people born between the years 1980 and 1995 are this way, but since this is how the same adults have chosen to represent us, we're obliged to indulge them.

We'll graduate from the top schools and go on aid missions around the globe, have resumes that stretch a page by the time we're fifteen, but we don't know the basics of punching a time clock, showing up and putting out, day in and day out. We're more special than ordinary people. Mowing the lawn for cash was never going to get us into Princeton, so we never did it. We then expect a title and a name on the door right out of the production line degree mill we just graduated from, and because those same adults always told us it was all within reach since we were small, we're demanding it now. Some of us are actually finding it, and some are facing the reality we always knew was there (despite the adults' best efforts to hide it from us).

And it's all thanks to the notion that "Every child should go to college." It's all thanks to the notion that "children who don't go to college turn out to be sleeping in the streets." When every child goes to college, we turn into a society of a skills abundance in limited use. It's all thanks to that notion that "no child should have to face adversity." It's all thanks to the concept that "children are innocent, and therefore must be spared from the adult world." I say, welcome to the new, happier, freer adulthood, where anyone can be anything they want to be--born not out of austerity, but from the dream of abundance--and pursuing not society's destruction (for once), but its constant creation and rebirth.

We of course remember those who came before us (...those who would criticize our sense of entitlement now), and struggle to live up to their esteemed shadow:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for angry fix.

--Allen Ginsberg, "Howl"  (1956)

But with entitlement comes responsibility, and we just have higher aspirations than being "destroyed by madness" or settling for less. We have careers to think about.

Now I still believe in reality, despite how I was raised--a reality where nobody cares about anyone, and least of all me. At the same time, I think there are still lessons to be learned from this cultural shift--from those who settle for whatever they can get to those who believe the choice is theirs--and that is of perseverance. Where the best among the youth of the past were having good times, destroying all modernity, the best of this generation are embracing modernity, and contributing for the good of society--not because they have to, but because they want to.

No child should "ever" have to face disappointment, they said, so I refuse to be disappointed. No matter what disappointment rears up, I refuse to let it put me down like it did those before me, because "greatness" is inevitably within my grasp, as it is for everyone equally, eventually. Reality, bring on the world.