What we pretend not to know about the sexual abuse of boys.
We won’t stop hearing about it, it’s time to stop acting surprised.
tw: csa for this old article of mine I never published before
Zeus and Ganymede. Romantic, isn’t it? I think it says a lot about the status of children that for most of our history the story of a God kidnapping a child and gifting horses to his parents as a consolation inspired artists as an example of ideal love or even spiritual elevation. This is because for most of our history, that’s what boys were, sexual objects. From Antiquity to the Renaissance, to the Victorian and Edwardian periods. We stop at the artistic depictions of this objectification, and we say it cannot be condemned because they were different times. But we don’t dare to go further. We don’t like to talk about the rape of slave boys, apprentice boys, cabin boys, boys who studied in monasteries, boys who studied in boarding schools, so called “delinquents” in reformatories. We close our eyes to it because Caravaggio’s art is pretty. No one cares that Da Vinci, among other men, raped Jacopo Saltarelli. We don’t have histories of it that aren’t celebratory, histories that do not talk about how the objectification of boys in art is a perfectly human research for “ideal beauty” (the discourse of beauty has been oppressing boys since Ancient Greece, where men’s sexual predation was naturalized as the normal reaction one could have to a boy’s beauty), that do not define the boys assaulted by the men we called “great” as their lovers. We don’t even have histories that grant them personhood. We may have the question of why this isn’t part of a feminist history, to seek their agency, as it has been done recently, even if in my humble layman’s opinion not without flaws, by Dr. Hope Cleves in her biography of author, and sexual abuser, Norman Douglas. That is because feminism has abandoned children as a whole. We don’t even have a similar history about the fate of girls as differentiated from that of women. That’s because today still, speaking of children as an oppressed class, and as a class that is victimized by the patriarchy and gendered oppression, is dangerous. We can’t say children are oppressed as children, and it is as taboo among the left as among the right. But how can we forget Florence Rush who talked about boys as victims of gendered oppression in her “Best Kept Secret”? How can we forget the feminist history that then never was, because we relegated youth liberation as an aberration of the radicalism of the 70s. This is why today we teach children to protect themselves (or better, we segregate children from adults on the presumption that it is a biological imperative for an adult to sexually predate on them) and blame them when they don’t, but we don’t teach adults children are more than “cute” bodies. Because this is the value a boy has in our culture. Cuteness at the most. But nothing he has to say is worthwhile, including sexual abuse allegations. For Shakespeare, a boy might be compared to a summer day, but he also was “…effeminate, changeable, longing and liking, proud,fantastical, apish, shallow, inconstant” (As You Like It). Plato waxes about the beauty of boys in the Symposium (and isn’t Alcibiades bad for tempting righteous men?), Phaedrus and Charmides, but he thought that “Of all the animals, the boy is the most unmanageable”. Children are bodies to gaze upon. Not minds to listen to. At best, a boy can pretend to be listening and learning from a man’s lesson to make him feel great, but his input isn’t needed. It isn’t even wanted. Generally the function of children is decorative. And what we learned is that boys exist to make men feel great, superheroes always have sidekicks. This is generally the function of mentoring. But boys hardly have a choice in that matter, because mentoring makes men feel superior. And it doesn’t surprise me that a lot of the sexual abusers of boys were also their mentors. Mentors who imagine teaching as Freire’s “banking model”, a form of chaste rape, especially in the past when it was usually coupled with corporal punishment, not so chaste rape. But even if one day we condemn Tuke’s bathing boys and insist children’s bodies be covered for the comfort of everyone, nothing will change. Boys would still exist under the gaze of their so called “elders and betters”. We don’t need more censorship. We need a conversation on male desire. Men have displaced these desires in particular on a bogeyman called “the pedophile”, a monster who hides in the dark and chases beautiful boys in dark forests, like a wolf waiting for a lamb to feast on. This construction reinforces the old stereotypes even as it casts them in a negative light. Zeus’s eagle lost its shine, but this construction also involves a framing of themselves as the “good guys”. How can you be sure you never made a boy uncomfortable? You can’t, you were told that as an adult you owned his body. You might be talking about being a rescuer, about shooting the pedophile, throwing him in the woodchipper, or whatever, but Fraad writes in her paper “At Home With Incest”, “one in ten boys, experience at least one incident of incestuous abuse by the time they are eighteen years old”, you aren’t fighting for his right to leave. When you talk about throwing the pedophile in the woodchipper, you aren’t different than an Ancient Roman father putting a bulla around his son’s neck to remind other men he isn’t the right boy to rape. The “right ones” were slaves then, and now it’s those boys who refuse to comply with the ageist power structure and find themselves in juvenile prisons, “troubled teen” concentration camps or psychiatric facilities. But not enough hate poured into that bogeyman will change the reality that under patriarchy men are instructed to desire what boys are instructed to be. Liddle’s article “Gender, desire and child sexual abuse: Accounting for the male majority” is not going to look good in today’s world where even feminists bought in the MRA lie that sexual abuse is gender neutral. But what he argues is true. He argues that men are socialized into eroticizing and fetishizing those that are ideally constructed as being less powerful, smaller, more passive and more acquiescent than them — women. Liddle therefore contends that it is only a small step to shift that eroticization onto those who are even smaller and less powerful — children — therefore gendering and sexualizing women and children in a similar way. But women and boys aren’t exactly gendered in the same way. They too have to learn to objectify and oppress younger boys, to always be at least “the man” to one boy. We can’t call this an aberration when statistics show most boys were harassed by older persons in their life. And we can’t call this an aberration because men themselves show us it’s not. Freund’s phallometric assessment of the erotic responses of “normal healthy men” (ie.heterosexuals) shows us 1 in 6 men displayed an attraction to boys aged 12 to 16, and 1 in 10 to boys aged 4 to 10. Only 4% responded to men 17 and up. Some people would say we cannot politicize an involuntary reaction. I say that we can. Because desire isn’t “natural” as they keep claiming. It’s socially engineered. The gaze men subject boys to is political, because the reverse isn’t true. In a novel by a sexual abuse victim, “Edinburgh”, the victim asks himself why there is no word for a young person sexually attracted to adults. And that is because not only sexuality is the exclusive province of the adult, but because while boys are designed as sexual objects men are not. But the supposed presence or a boy’s desire for a man can already be seen enough of a provocation to warrant a “punishment”. As we can evince from Henk Heithuis’ sad story. And as we can evince from many sexist and homophobic moral panics. Boys today are too feminine (Implict: How am I supposed to control myself?). In the 50s homophobic PSA “Boys Beware” the boy is incarcerated as well at the end. This was the reality of a lot of boys before a universal age of consent (which is itself not perfect). We bought in the MRA lie that sexual abuse isn’t gendered, and therefore we can also buy the lie that it has no age. That saying grouping men and boys together as victims when discussing male sexual assault isn’t problematic. In America, 90% of sexual assaults experienced by males are experienced by boys under 19. What percentage of the sexual assault of men is committed by boys? We can lie to ourselves but it won’t change the truth that men rape boys and boys do not rape men. This is also the international picture: 1 in 6 boys have been sexually assaulted as compared to 1 in 71 men. Pretending this is a natural and not political fact posits that the social position of children is natural. It’s not. There are countries like India, where 1 in 2 boys have been raped. South Africa, where the number is 1 in 3. In Pakistan and Afghanistan violent rapes, not just sexual harassment, of boys are normalized and encouraged, proof one is a “real man”. But we can’t claim to be better than this. As I already pointed out, we just singled out which boys it’s okay to sexually assault. We can literally sentence boys to rape in our carceral state. A juvenile offender in an adult prison is five times more likely to be sexually assaulted, and juvenile prisons are already rife with sexual violence. The Marshall Project’s feature piece called “A Boy Among Men” subtitles it’s article: “What happens when you throw a teenager into an adult prison? Guess.” And that’s what we truly believe. That it couldn’t be otherwise. Men rape and boys are raped. But we try to hide it. When discussing the sexual abuse of boys, despite the horrifying news of institutional abuse coming in everyday, we use hypocritical language, we talk about how all victims are valid, about how gender and age don’t matter but then we assume what is likely to be the truth, that a boy was assaulted because he was a boy, and that it wouldn’t have happened if he was a man, most likely. We need to start speaking about it honestly. It’s the only way to stop it one day. We need to name adult and male supremacy, it’s about criticizing the misopedy that plagues our society, it’s not about reviving radical feminist understandings of child sexual abuse as exclusively an issue of male dominance. It’s how we get free. There’s no other way, or we will keep reacting with surprise rather than anger at the countless “scandals” like the Boy Scouts’.
Sources:
Rani, B. (2011) ‘Male adolescent concubinage in Peshawar, Northwestern Pakistan’.
