Pédophilie (with Reference to the Cases of Michel Foucault and Gabriel Matzneff)

 Suffer the little children to come unto us ...

 

Whatever some people choose to believe, children are not angels and even pre-pubescent youngsters possess an immature form of sexuality that they will often seek to playfully explore as a natural part of their development. That, we might say, is simply an established (biological and psychological) fact.  

 

The problem, however, is that this fact of child sexuality is subject to an ever-shifting socio-cultural interpretation by adults, some of whom wish to safeguard the innocence of those deemed to be incapable of giving consent and some of whom wish to share in or exploit the affections of children whom they argue are perfectly capable of expressing their feelings and know very well what they do and do not want to do.         

 

This latter position was pretty much that of everyone who located themselves on the radical wing of French politics in the 1960s and '70s, including, for example, Michel Foucault ... 

 

In 1977, having previously added his name to an open letter published by Le Monde [1] defending three individuals who had been charged over sexual activity with minors (or what is known outside of France as statutory rape), Foucault signed a petition addressed to the French parliament calling for the decriminalisation of all consensual relations between adults and minors under the age of fifteen [2]. He also later took part in a radio discussion of this topic with Guy Hocquenghem and Jean Danet [3].

 

Amongst other things, they expressed their shared concern that the penal system was not merely punishing acts deemed criminal, but in the process of constructing a new type of bogeyman - the paedophile - who was being held up as a danger to society in much the same way that the figure of the homosexual had previously been used.         

 

For Foucault, the suggestion that children - particularly over the age of twelve - were unable to consent to sexual relations (either with one another or with adults) was itself an unacceptable form of abuse, restricting their right to freedom and decision making via the use of contractual law introduced into the amorous realm. Children, he said, should be fully empowered to find pleasure in any way they liked.

 

What this argument ultimately hinges upon is whether one considers child sexuality as fundamentally different from adult sexual behavior and, as such, something that should be preserved as a form of virgin territory "with its own geography that the adult must not enter" [4] under any circumstances or for any reason. 

 

Clearly, Foucault isn't prepared to buy into this idea of children's sexuality as a specific sexuality "with its own forms, its own periods of maturation, its own highpoints, its specific drives, and its own latency periods" [5]. Nor does he think that children are a particularly vulnerable population who need protecting from adults or, indeed, from their own desires.

 

It's precisely this kind of thinking that, over forty years later, has finally landed Gabriel Matzneff in hot water ... [6]

 

Notes

 

[1] Foucault was not the only well-known French intellectual to sign this; his name was just one of over sixty attached to the letter - written by Gabriel Matzneff (see footnote 6 below) - that appeared in Le Monde on 26 January, 1977. For an English translation of the letter and a list of the signatories, click here.

 

[2] Again, it should be noted that the petition was also signed by many other prominent intellectuals, including Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, and even dear old Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. As I say in the post, pretty much everyone on the radical left at this time was pro-sexual freedom, the extension of civil rights, and the breaking of all taboos (if only to outrage the bourgeoisie). For an interesting article by John Henley writing in The Guardian (24 Feb 2001) on how the call to legalise sex with children rebounded on some of the luminaries of May '68, click here.    

 

[3] The radio discussion was produced by Roger Pillaudin and broadcast by France Culture on 4 April, 1978. A transcript was later published as La Loi de la pudeur in Recherches 37, April 1979. The first full translation in English, by Alan Sheridan, appeared under the title 'Sexual Morality and the Law' in Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, (Routledge, 1988). This was republished as 'The Danger of Child Sexuality', in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961-1984, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, (Semiotext(e), 1996).   

 

[4] and [5] Michel Foucault, 'The Danger of Child Sexuality', in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961-1984, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth and John Johnston, (Semiotext(e), 1996), p. 267.

 

[6] Gabriel Matzneff is a French writer who had long boasted of his penchant for sex with children and openly detailed his activities in his books. Despite this, he escaped criminal prosecution for many decades and enjoyed the support of the French literary establishment. However, at the end of 2019 Vanessa Springora published Le Consentement, describing her illicit relationship with Matzneff in the mid-1980s when she was fourteen and he was fifty. The book ignited a controversy in France and led to prosecutors opening a rape inquiry. Matzneff is also due to appear in court in September of this year charged with being an apologiste for paedophilia in a case brought by the Blue Angel Association.    

On the Sex Life of the Incredible Shrinking Man 2: Paedophilia

 The Incredible Shrinking Man 10: The Babysitter (2012)

By DrCreep on deviantart.com 

I. Size Matters

 

Predators come in all shapes and sizes: from deadly spiders lurking in the basement, to opportunistic paedophiles searching for young flesh ... And so to the case of Scott Carey once more, protagonist of Richard Matheson's disturbing 1956 novel The Shrinking Man [1] ...

The critical consensus seems to be that the novel is primarily concerned with issues surrounding masculinity in white middle-class suburban America in the early Atomic Age. I'm quite happy to accept that reading as, clearly, Scott is anxious about his status as a man in society - as a husband and father, for example - once he begins to radically shrink in size:

 

"He thought of them [...] the woman and the little girl. His wife and daughter. Were they still that to him? Or had the element of size removed him from their sphere? Could he still be considered a part of their world when he was the size of a bug to them, when even Beth could crush him underfoot and never know it?" [Ch. 2]  

 

Even when he's only slightly smaller, he feels belittled, emasculated, and infantalised. Scott realised that whilst poets and philosophers "could talk all they wanted about a man's being more than fleshly form, about his essential worth, about the immeasurable stature of his soul" this was nonsense - as they'd soon discover if they ever tried to "hold a woman with arms that couldn't reach around her" or stand up to another man and find themselves staring at his belt buckle. [Ch. 5]

 

One day, having showered and shaved, his wife comments on how clean and smooth he looks: "Was it just ego-flattened imagination, or was she actually talking to him as if he were a boy?" [Ch. 5]  

 

It's precisely this boyishness that lands Scott in a potentially sticky situation later in the book, in a controversial scene (not included in the film adaptation) involving a paedophile with whom he accepts a ride, unconcered about stranger danger when, in his mind, he's still an adult male. 

 

 

II. Chapter Seven

 

Driving home one day, Scott has a blowout and is forced to trudge along the roadside in his little-boy clothes. After a while, a car cruises passes and pulls up. Then a queer figure sticks his head out of the open door and asks: "'You alone, my boy?'" Somewhat reluctanty, Scott naively decides to ask for a lift from the cigar-smoking stranger: "Maybe it was all right; the man thought he was a boy."

The stranger eagerly agrees - "'Certainly, my boy, certainly'" - and Scott decides to keep up the pretence of being a child. Jumping in to the passenger seat, he finds himself sitting on the stranger's hand which has been accidently on purpose left there. "The man drew it away, held it before his eyes. 'You have injured the member, my boy,' he said, and chuckled."

 

Obviously, Scott should have realised there and then that the man with bushy eyebrows over darkly glittering eyes and a thick-lipped mouth was a nonce, and quickly got out of the car whilst he still had the chance. But he didn't. Instead, he just smiled nervously as the stale smelling vehicle pulled away. He noticed the man was drunk and rather wished he was as well (I suppose if you're about to be touched up or sodomised, then alcohol always helps). 

 

The stranger tells him of a lost love, Vincent; lost to matrimony and the accursed female sex. Scott is bored. And tired. He longs for his bed and to forget who he is and what's happening to him. The stranger peers at Scott, ironically sizing him up, and trying to guess his age. He plumps for twelve: "An age of pristine possibility [... and] untrammelled hope", and clamps a fat hand on Scott's leg, giving it a little squeeze. 

 

Then, looking directy at him, he asks Scott if likes girls: 

 

"The question caught Scott off guard. He hadn't really been paying attention to the drift of the man's monologue. He looked over at the man. Suddenly the man seemed bigger; as if, with the questions, he had gained measurable bulk." 

 

For the first time, Scott starts to feel a little nervous. His heartbeat quickened as he felt the heat of the man's heavy hand on his leg once more. The stranger offers an invitation back to his place for ice cream, cake, and "a bit of bawdy badinage". The hand now gripped with a certain menace and Scott orders him to remove it: "The man looked startled at the adult anger in Scott's voice, the lowering of pitch, the authority." 

 

Scott repeatedly asks the stranger to stop the car and let him out. Frustrated, the man suddenly drops his lame attempts to be witty and charming and resorts to violence to get his way, smashing his hand hard aganist the side of Scott's head, forcing the latter to realise with a burst of panic, just how vulnerable he was.   

  

Matheson concludes this disturbing scene thusly:

 

"'Dear boy, I apologize [...] Did I hurt you?' 

      'I live down the next road,' Scott said tensely. 'Stop here, please.' The man plucked out his cigar and threw it on the floor. 

      'I offend you, boy,' he said, sounding as if he were about to cry. 'I offend you with distasteful words. Please. Please. Look behind the words, behind the peeling mask of jollity. For there is utter sadness, there is utter loneliness. Can you understand that, dear boy? Can you, in your tender years, know my - ' 

      'Mister, I want to get out,' Scott said. His voice was that of a boy, half angry, half frightened. And the horror of it was that he wasn't sure if there was more of acting or of actuality in his voice. Abruptly the man pulled over to the side of the highway. 

      'Leave me, leave me, then,' he said bitterly. 'You're no different from the rest, no, not at all.' Scott shoved open the door with trembling hands. 

      'Good night, sweet prince,' said the heavy man, fumbling for Scott's hand. 'Good night and dreams of plenteous goodness bless thy repose.' A wheezy hiccup jarred his curtain speech. 'I go on, empty, empty ... empty. Will you kiss me once? For good-bye, for - ' 

      But Scott was already out of the car and running, headlong toward the service station they had just passed. The man turned his heavy head and watched youth racing away from him."

 

 

III. Chapter Eleven (Part 1)

 

Despite this experience, it doesn't stop Scott from later perving on Catherine, the teenager hired by his wife, Louise, to look after their daughter, Beth, whilst she's out at work at the local grocery store; he being incapable of so-doing - "barely reaching the height of Beth's chest" - and, moreover, unwilling to try.

 

At first, he hears only the babysitter's voice, but that's enough to trigger a detailed fantasy of what she might look like as he sits in his cellar hideaway:

 

"He listened to the rise and fall of Catherine's voice, wondering what she was saying and what she looked like. Bemused, he put the indistinct voice to distinct form. She was five feet six, slim waisted and long-legged, with young, up tilted breasts nudging out her blouse. Fresh young face, reddish-blonde hair, white teeth. [...] He sighed and stirred uncomfortably on the chair. The girl stretched to the urging of his fancy, and her breasts, like firm-skinned oranges, forced out their silken sheathing." 

 

He tries to dismiss the image from his mind, but the girl "had half taken off her blouse before he shut the curtain on her forcibly imposed indelicacy" and the bubbling of desire continued no matter what he did to contain or deny it. And so, when the opportunity arises to sneak-a-peek at Catherine in the yard he takes it, peering through a cobwebbed window. Her actual appearance is rather different from his fantasy of her:

 

"Five feet six had become five feet three. The slim waist and legs had become chunky muscle and fat; the young, up-tilted breasts had vanished in the loose folds of a long-sleeved sweat shirt. The fresh young face lurked behind grossness and blemishes, the reddish-blonde hair had been dyed to a lackluster chestnut. [...] The colour of her eyes he couldn't see. 

      He watched Catherine move around the yard, her broad buttocks cased in faded dungarees, her bare feet stuck in loafers."

 

Still, that doesn't stop him wondering how old she is - just as the paedo in chapter seven had wondered how old he was; one wonders if the concern is whether the object of one's desire is under or over the age of consent? Later, he gazes at her as she plays catch with his daughter wearing a pale blue two-piece swimsuit, admiring the round swell of her breasts. 

 

Matheson writes:

 

"Scott crouched on top of the boxes, watching Catherine as she caught the red ball and threw it back to Beth. It wasn't until he'd been there five minutes that he realized he was rigidly tensed, waiting for Catherine to drop the ball and bend over to pick it up. When he realized that, he slid off the boxes with a disturbed clumsiness and went back to the chair. 

      He sat there breathing harshly, trying not to think about it. What in God's name was happening to him? The girl was fourteen, maybe fifteen, short and chubby, and yet he'd been staring at her almost hungrily." 

 

As George Costanza might ask: Is that wrong? Should he not have done that? But what is a man supposed to do when shrinking inch-by-inch and spending most of the day in a cellar worried about a spider? And besides, even if she was only fifteen, "she was an awfully advanced fifteen" ... 

 

Returning to the window so that he may further admire her body in fetishistic detail, Scott is tempted to shout out: "'Come down, down here, pretty girl!'" Resisting the urge to do so, he continues lusting after her in secret, sick vicariousness:

 

"She'd loosened her halter while she'd been lying in the sun, and it hung down almost off her breasts as she leaned over. Even in the dim light, he could see the distinct line of demarcation where tanned flesh became milk-white. No, he heard someone begging in his mind. No, get back. She'll see you. Catherine leaned over a little more, reaching for a ball, and the halter slipped. 'Oops,' said Catherine, putting things to order. Scott's head fell back against the wall. It was damply cool in there, but wings of heat were buffeting his cheeks [...] He stood there feeling as if every joint and muscle were swollen and hot. 'I can't,' he muttered, shaking his head slowly. 'I can't. I can't.' He didn't know what he meant exactly, but he knew it was something important. 

      'How old's that girl?' he asked [his wife] that evening, not even glancing up from his book, as though the question had just, idly and unimportantly, occurred to him. 

      'Sixteen, I think,' Lou answered. 

      'Oh,' he said, as if he had already forgotten why he asked. Sixteen. Age of pristine possibility. Where had he heard that phrase?" 

 

Does this mean that victims of sexual assault or abuse are themselves likely to commit such? Or does it show that no one is innocent and that, given the chance, we are all capable of perverse acts, or, at the very least, thinking obscene thoughts? I don't know. What it does demonstrate for certain is that the novel is a far more troubling proposition than the film. 

  

IV. Chapter Eleven (Part 2)

 

For those who might be worried, Scott never does attempt to actually assault Catherine, even if he obsessively continues his open-mouthed voyeurism - one day peeping on her, for example, as she comes out of the shower holding a yellow bath towel in front of her naked body:

 

"His gaze moved slowly down the smooth concavity of her back, the indentation of her spine a thin shadow that ran down and was lost between the muscular half-moons of her white buttocks. He couldn't take his eyes from her. His hands shook at his sides." 

 

Conviently for him, Catherine drops the towel: 

 

"She put her hands behind her head and drank in a heavy breath. Scott saw her left breast swing up and stand out tautly, the nipple like a dark spear point. Her arms moved out. She stretched and writhed. When she turned he was still in the same tense, muscle quivering pose. [...] He saw her bend over and pick up the towel, her breasts hanging down, white and heavy. She stood up and walked out of the room. He sank down on his heels and had to clutch at the railing to keep his legs from going limp beneath him."

 

Soon, it is almost impossible for him to think of anything else but the girl; he might be able to read a book for an hour or two, "but ultimately the vision of Catherine would flit across his mind" and he would have to go spy on her, jerk off, or down a bottle of whisky: "Life had become one unending morbid adventure." Even sleep brought him no respite, turgid as it was with dreams of Catherine "in which she grew progressively more alluring". 

 

Still, all things - good, bad, or indecent - come to an end sooner or later ... And in this case the end came with shocking suddenness, when Catherine became aware of him spying on her as she did the ironing in a state of semi-undress. Scared stiff at having given himself away, Scott runs back to hide in the cellar. He felt sick at the thought of what his wife would say when she found out. 

 

It seems, then, that not only intelligence but also guilt exists on an infinite scale or continuum; that just because a man shrinks in size - even if it be to a molecular level where he becomes-imperceptible - he can still feel ashamed ... 

   

 

Notes

 

[1] Again, as in the first post in this series [click here], it's important to note that I'm discussing the book and not the film based on the book, The Incredible Shrinking Man (dir. Jack Arnold, 1957), which, brilliant as it was, mostly ignored the sexually troubling aspects of the novel, including the paedophilia, or, technically speaking, one instance of (pseudo or mistaken) hebephilia in which Scott Carey is the victim, and one case of voyeuristic ephebophilia in which he is the offender (see chapters seven and eleven respectively, as discussed in the post). I'm aware that some people refuse to make such distinctions and think them clinically irrelevant. It seems to me, however, that there is a significant difference between desiring adolescents and having an erotic fixation with pre-pubescent children. The latter may very well be pathological, but experiencing attraction to a teen who has passed puberty is, from a biological perspective, a perfectly valid form of reproductive behaviour. Of course, that doesn't excuse abuse and readers are reminded that sexual activity with a minor is illegal in all instances.  

 

To read part three of this series - on the Incredible Shrinking Man and agalmatophilia, click here.

 

 

The Gods Have Become Our Diseases

Cover image - by the author's daughter, Flavia Tower - 
to the first UK edition (Victor Gollancz, 1971)

I.

"We think we can congratulate ourselves on having already reached such a pinnacle of clarity, imagining that we have left all these phantasmal gods far behind. But what we have left behind are only verbal spectres, not the psychic facts that were responsible for the birth of the gods. We are still as much possessed today by autonomous psychic contents as if they were Olympians. Today they are called phobias, obsessions, and so forth; in a word, neurotic symptoms. The gods have become diseases."  

- C. G. Jung, Alchemical Studies (Collected Works, Vol. 13)

  

In this crucially insightful passage, Jung provides the key to understanding Daphne du Maurier's short story 'Not After Midnight' - a tragic tale of two ruined lives: by Silenian dipsomania in the case of a brutish American collector of antiquities, Mr. Stoll; and by pederastic satyrism in the case of the English schoolmaster and amateur painter Timothy Grey.

II.

Grey, who narrates the tale, begins by informing us that he has, in fact, recently resigned from his teaching post at a boy's prep school, "in order to forestall inevitable dismissal" [56].

The reason he gave for his resignation was ill health. But Grey doesn't specify what the nature of his sickness is, or why it should make his dismissal inevitable. He simply says that it was caused by a "wretched bug picked up on holiday in Crete" [56]. Clearly, however, it's more than a funny tummy ...

Has he, perhaps, caught some kind of sexually transmitted disease? Is that the universal complaint from which he suffers? A dose of the clap would seem to be a possibility, but Grey is keen for us to know that the bug he caught "was picked up in all innocence" and was not due to "excess of the good life" [56].     

It also seems possible that Grey is, in fact, referring indirectly to what some consider a perverse disorder; did he resign because repressed homosexual desire had manifested itself and become known to his fellow teachers and pupils? The following statement lends credence to this:

"My complaint is universal, and has been so through the ages, an excuse for jest and hilarious laughter from earliest times, until one of us oversteps the mark and becomes a menace to society." [56]

Actually, this explanation - although mistaken - is nearer the mark. But what Grey suffers from is not the flowering of an all too human sexual predisposition; his erotomania is the result, rather, of divine madness - or what Grey describes as a form of insidious evil.

In other words, he's in the process of becoming-satyr, rather than merely coming out - and that's a much more problematic proposition within modern European culture; for whilst homosexuality has been decriminalised (and is, in fact, now thought of as something to celebrate), paedophilia certainly hasn't (and isn't).

III.  

Grey's problems begin when he bumps into the physically intimidating and drunken figure of Stoll, who gives him a gift; a drinking vessel which, whilst empty of libation, was nevertheless still able to intoxicate:

"It was a small jug, reddish in colour, with a handle on either side for safe holding. [...] The body of the jug had been shaped cunningly and brilliantly into a man's face, with upstanding ears like scallop-shells, while protruding eyes and bulbous nose stood out above the leering, open mouth, the moustache drooping to the rounded beard that formed the base. At the top, between the handles, were the upright figures of three strutting men, their faces similar to that upon the jug, but here human resemblance ended, for they had neither hands nor feet but hooves, and from each of their hairy rumps extended a horse's tail." [88]

That night, Grey has queer dreams from which he struggles to awaken; dreams that "belonged to some other unknown world horribly intermingled with [his] own" [89]:

"Term had started, but the school in which I taught was on a mountain top hemmed in by forest [...] My boys, all of them familiar faces, lads I knew, wore vine-leaves in their hair, and had a strange, unearthly beauty both endearing and corrupt. They ran towards me, smiling, and I put my arms about them, and the pleasure they gave me was insidious and sweet, never before experienced, never before imagined, the man who pranced in their midst and played with them was not myself, not the self I knew, but a demon shadow emerging from a jug [...]" [89]

Grey decides the rhyton is a source of magical malevolence and that the terrible dreams which it induced were utterly foreign to his nature - but one can't help wondering about this; perhaps it simply enables one to become who one is ...

Later in the tale, we discover that Stoll has also left Grey a bottle of home-brewed drink, which, surprisingly, he agrees to try:

"It was like the barley-water my mother used to make when I was a child. And equally tasteless. And yet ... it left a sort of aftermath on the palate and the tongue. Not as sweet as honey nor as sharp as grapes, but pleasant, like the smell of raisins under the sun, curiously blended with the ears of ripening corn." [91]

He even drinks the stuff for a second time; from the demonic jug, which, on reflection - and under the influence of Stoll's home-brew -, now appeared rather beautiful:

"I don't know how it was, but somehow the leering face no longer seemed so lewd. It had a certain dignity that had escaped me before. [...] I wondered whether Socrates had looked thus when he strolled in the Athenian agora with his pupils and discoursed on life. He could have done. And his pupils may not necessarily have been the young men whom Plato said they were, but of a tenderer age, like my lads at school, like those youngsters of eleven or twelve who had smiled upon me in my dreams [...]" [97]

Grey continues:

"I felt the scalloped ears, the rounded nose, the full soft lips of the tutor Silenos upon the jar, the eyes no longer protruding but questioning, appealing, and even the naked horsemen on the top had grown in grace. It seemed to me now they were not strutting in conceit but dancing with linked hands, filled with gay abandon, a pleasing, wanton joy." [97]

It is only upon discovering the body of Stoll beneath the waves - "grotesque, inhuman [... swaying] backwards and forwards at the bidding of the current" [99] - that Grey, with understandable panic, decides to fling the jug into the sea:

"Even as I did so, I knew the gesture was in vain. It did not sink immediately but remained bobbing on the surface, then slowly filled with that green translucent sea, pale as the barley liquid laced with spruce and ivy. Not innocuous but evil, stifling conscience, dulling intellect, the hell-brew of the smiling god Dionysus, which turned his followers into drunken sots, would claim another victim [...] The eyes in the swollen face stared up at me, and they were not only those of Silenos the satyr tutor, and of the drowned Stoll, but my own as well [...] They seemed to hold all knowledge in their depths, and all despair." [100]

IV.

The point of the tale is this: becoming-Greek in a Classical sense certainly opens up a whole new way of life and a whole new world of experience, but from the moral-legal standpoint of today it spells trouble, putting you at risk of a lengthy prison sentence and of having your name added to the sex offenders register.

Those who romanticise the pre-Christian past in all its pagan splendour and think the gods of Olympus were a splendid bunch, should maybe read a bit more history and acknowledge the tragic nature of Greek mythology in which incest, rape, murder, and sodomy (in its widest sense) were the norm.*

*Note: Some readers - with knowledge of my background in Dionysian philosophy and an openly pagan past - might be surprised (even disappointed) by this conclusion. But I would remind them that even a youthful Nietzsche, writing in The Birth of Tragedy, wasn't for frenzied excess and promiscuity overriding every form of law; he warns against the savage urges of lust and cruelty and advocates for their aesthetic sublimation.  
 

See: 

C. G. Jung, The Collected Works, Vol. 13: Alchemical Studies, ed. Gerhard Adler, trans. R. F. C. Hull, (Princeton University Press, 1983), 'Commentary on "The Secret of the Golden Flower"', para. 54. 

Daphne du Maurier, 'Not After Midnight', in Don't Look Now and Other Stories, (Penguin Books, 2006), pp. 56-100. All page references given in the text refer to this edition.

Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Shaun Whiteside, (Penguin Books, 1993).

This post is for Maria Thanassa.

Notes on the Case of Andrew Dobson and the Chinese Sex Doll

The doll in the Andrew Dobson case: 

thoughtfully pixelated by the British Press 

so as not to cause offence or arouse illicit desire    

Following the prosecution and jailing last month of 49-year-old Andrew Dobson for attempting to import a supposedly childlike mannequin - deemed to be an indecent object - into the UK from Hong Kong, moral and legal experts have been debating the ethics of non-consensual relations with increasingly sophisticated and apparently soon-to-be sentient sex dolls - particularly when designed to appear underage.

Seeing as this is a subject on which I have previously written at some length, I feel entitled to offer my own thoughts here ...

Firstly, I'd like to point out that - contrary to what's been claimed in some quarters - this is not the first time that an item of this nature have been stopped from entering the country. In fact, sex dolls were banned from doing so back in 1876 on the grounds that as objects used primarily to facilitate human sexual pleasure they were inherently obscene.

However, this ban was lifted in 1987 under European free trade agreements, so I'm not sure on what grounds border force officials at East Midlands Airport were entitled to intercept the doll addressed to Dobson and alert the police who subsequently arrested him at his home.   

Secondly, as Dobson's defence counsel Simon Parry pointed out during his trial at Chester Crown Court, although the prosecution insisted on describing the doll as childlike it was more accurate to describe it as child sized. Even the forensic physician and paediatric consultant who examined the doll on behalf of the prosecution, only agreed its size would be consistent with that of a girl aged between four and six were it a child - but, of course, it's not a child; it's a doll that hasn't been manufactured to a realistic adult scale.

Parry also mentioned the mitigating fact that there was nothing in the online promotional material or sales description, indicating that it should be thought of as a child sex doll.

Now - just to be clear - I'm not saying that Dobson isn't the twisted pervert that some in the media have made him out to be; he was discovered to have pornographic images of children on his computer and pleaded guilty to both making and possessing such images. However, I do not think buying a silicone doll on ebay for sexual gratification - be it in the form of a child, an animal, or an alien entity - should be a criminal offence.

Members of the Cheshire constabulary and tabloid journalists may find it sickening that some individuals choose to indulge dark masturbatory fantasies involving perverse acts and illicit paraphilias, but it's surely important to realise that real acts with objects simply aren't the same as actual acts with bodies.

Ultimately, I suspect that in addition to the legitimate concerns surrounding paedophilia there are other forms of puritanism and prejudice at play here. Thus it is, for example, that in closing Judge Nathanial Berkson said he was disgusted to think that such dolls even existed: "The user would be, in effect, able to simulate sex with a child" - and heaven forbid that should be allowed, for, as Baudrillard provocatively suggested, simulation is the gravest sin of all in the eyes of those defenders of the Real.

The authorities, in other words, find a self-consciously simulated act or virtual crime far more disconcerting and dangerous than a real one. If you rape a child, you clearly transgress the law and thus paradoxically reaffirm the criminal justice system. But if you simulate the rape of a child, it throws a spanner in the works and you expose the essential immorality - and absurdity - of a system that rests on a set of values that are ultimately null and void.

Of course, this doesn't mean the authorities won't respond exactly as if you committed a real crime - indeed, as Dobson has now discovered, they may very well come down even harder upon you.

And all the while I can hear David Bowie singing ... 

On Lewis Carroll and His Love for Alice Liddell and Other Little Girls

Six-year old Alice Liddell dressed as a beggar-child 

in a photograph by Lewis Carroll (1858)

As everyone knows, Lewis Carroll was extremely fond of children (except boys) and very much liked to keep their company. And to photograph them. He seems to have found their beauty unearthly, though not inhuman in the manner of the nymphet as described by Nabokov.

Adopting the Roman symbol of good fortune, Carroll would call a white stone day one on which he met by chance a memorable girl-child; on a train journey, for example, or at an exhibition, or perhaps at the seaside. He always carried with him a little bag full of puzzles, tricks and small gifts with which to entertain any little girls he might encounter on such a day. And he carried too a supply of safety pins for pinning up their skirts, should they wish to paddle in the surf.

Many lovely little creatures skipped and danced their way into Carroll's life and his affections. But none quite left their mark on him as did Alice Liddell, who, again as everyone knows, provided the inspiration (or at the very least the name) for Carroll's most famous literary creation.

There has been much speculation - not all of it pleasant or supported with evidence - about the precise nature of Carroll's relationship with Alice (as, indeed, with her older sister, Lorina). I doubt very much, however, that he wanted to sexually abuse her and would refrain from (retrospectively) describing him as a predatory paedophile; it's important to remember that Carroll lived in a time very different from our own.   

Having said that, he was clearly infatuated with the girl, whom he adored in that peculiar Victorian manner - sublimating illicit desire into ideal moral sentiment - and although there's no record of actual impropriety, there were enough elements of perviness to concern her mother who, eventually, took steps to discourage Carroll's relationship with her daughters and burned all of his early letters to Alice (letters that often closed with 10,000,000 kisses).

Ultimately, if obliged to take a position on this affair, I tend to agree with the American writer and critic, Katie Roiphe, whose 2001 work, Still She Haunts Me, is a fictional reimagining of the relationship between Carroll and Alice which suggests they were essentially friends with benefits - but not the kind of benefits that we've come to expect.

I agree also with Roiphe, writing in an essay, that, whilst Carroll was no drooling child molester, neither was he the shy, stuttering, essentially sexless bachelor that some of his defenders would have us believe. It is, she writes, simply absurd to claim that Carroll was drawn to little girls on a purely spiritual plane; his erotico-aesthetic appreciation of their physical charms was too conspicuous.

To his credit, however, he exercised great discipline and, rather than indulge his carnal urges, produced amazing works of imaginative nonsense instead. There is, says Roiphe, something noble in a practice of self-restraint "so forceful that it spews out stuttering tortoises and talking chess pieces ..."

She concludes:

"There is something touching about a man who fights the hardest fight in the world: his own desire. You can feel the loneliness on the page. You can the feel the longing in the photographs. You can witness the self-contempt in his diaries. ... He had impure thoughts, yes. But what matters, in the end, is what he did with them."

See: Katie Roiphe, 'Just Good Friends', article in The Guardian (29 Oct 2001): click here to read.