A rchive Date
[ 19-03-2005 ]
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[ International Relations ]
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[ Canada ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/hay.html
Boys will be boys; girls are princesses
By DENISE HAY - For London Free Press
December 7, 2001
The banning of the new film, Fat Girl, goes to show how far we've progressed in hundreds of years of sexual neurosis. Ontario censors continue to decide it's OK for kids to see virtually any form of anti-social or violent behaviour, but the sexual content of Fat Girl is not to be borne.
We won't think of our children as sexual beings, we will not tolerate anyone else thinking of them in that way and we continue to perpetuate social schizophrenia around the subject of sex that engenders the cycle of confusion and ambivalence that's been handed down for generations.
As a culture, we wallow in youth obsession and sexual iconography, but we not only refuse to acknowledge sexuality in our children, but vilify anyone who does. Vladmir Nabokov's 1955 novel, Lolita, still causes contention and debate 50 years after publication.
To consider Lolita a pornographic book is not only ignorant, but missing a point as relevant now as then. Lolita herself is both callow and knowing; victimized and manipulative. Lolita is what all children are sooner than anyone wants to think and even so many years later, it's still a subject few seem to want to examine.
Nabokov's point was to satirize our notions of innocence - an entirely adult construct - while at the same time provide a moral compass that can still function without requiring the loss of innocence as its primary pole.
We are born imperfect, we don't suddenly acquire fatal flaws and the potential to be bad when the mantle of adulthood is draped over us. Children can be selfish, mean-spirited, covetous, competitive, manipulative, insensitive and often cruel.
In many ways, growing up does not mean losing innocence so much as learning to become a better person, finding out which behaviour puts you in ill odour and which does you credit.
If there is any loss of innocence, surely it must occur at birth. William Golding's book, Lord of the Flies, is, unlike Lolita, an acceptable inclusion in school curriculum, even though its message is more alarming than anything Lolita stood for. Objectively speaking, what is wrong with a young woman - even a very young woman - recognizing her place in the male sexual world and talking control of that. Surely the opposite is a far worse scenario.
But while the young boys' descent into savagery in the Lord of the Flies carries a message similar to Nabokov's - challenging our notions of innocence - the sexual content of Lolita and the idea of sexuality present in children creates the kind of frenzy and abhorrence that evidently the appalling savageness of young boys does not.
Boys will be boys, but girls are princesses.
This is a society still anxious about sex, despite pretending to be the happy fallout of the '60s. We deny children any interest in their own bodies because it makes us deeply uncomfortable and that discomfort impresses upon children very early. Adults fear any curiousity will see children banished from the garden of innocence and losing innocence, it seems, is the worst fate to befall a child.
That child pornography is wrong is incontestable, but the hysteria and emotion that surrounds the issue, causing even the most cerebral to fall into paroxysms of moral outrage, surely must say something more profound about our society than just labelling child porn addicts as pariahs and divorcing ourselves from any culpability.
No other Biblical myth seems more pernicious and pervasive to me than the Garden of Eden.
Nabokov and Golding, among others, tried to take on this notion and succeeded only in shocking. We continue to hold children up as keepers of innocence for our own purposes and it does no end of harm. We are trying to regain a dream, desperately grasping at smoke and we burden children with this inevitable fall again and again by hoisting them high on the flimsy scaffold of innocence.
Denise Hay is a London freelance writer. Her column appears every other Saturday.
Letters to the editor should be sent to letters@lfpress.com.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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