Against Everything

by Mark Greif

  I was reluctant to say that I felt these explanations were inadequate and even in bad faith. The trouble with Lolita is plainly its ability to describe what a sexual twelve-year-old looks like. What her dress is like when it brushes her knees, what her toes are like with painted nails, how the color sits on the plump bow of her lips—the phrase for this is that it is “too real”; that’s the scandal. It continues to be the scandal fifty years after publication, and it will be a scandal whenever any adult acknowledges the capacity to upend his vision and see a child, protected larval stage of the organism, as a sexual object. The girl is still a child, only now she is a sex child. Yet this makes me feel Nabokov was not a pedophile, but something he is not credited with being—a social critic.

  You, too, see it, or should. The trend of these fifty years has been to make us see sexual youth where it doesn’t exist, and ignore it as it does. Adults project the sex of children in lust, or examine children sexually with magnifying glasses to make sure they don’t appeal to us. But these lenses became burning glasses. The hips of Betty Grable melted and disappeared. The breasts of Marilyn Monroe ran off and were replaced with silicone. The geography of fashion created new erogenous zones—pelvic midriff, rear cleavage—for dieters starving off their secondary sex characteristics, and for young teens, in the convergence of the exerciser and the pubescent child. The waif and the pixie became ideal. Mama and daughter look the same again before the bedroom mirror—not dressed up in Mama’s pearls and heels, this time, but in children’s wear. The dream belongs to sixteen, or to those who can starve themselves to sixteen.

  The critic Philip Fisher has noted that Lolita, tightly plotted as it is, repeats one scene twice. Humbert spies a lit window far opposite. Because he longs to see a nymphet, he sees one. The wave of arousal returns, its tide dampening him up to his knees. As he nears the climax, the form is refocused as an adult woman or man. Disgusting! But this is a simple inversion of a characteristic experience of our time. A man will see a distant form, in low-cut top and low-slung jeans, and think he is on the trail of eroticism; draw near, and identify a child. Revolting! The defenses against it continue the problem. The more a whole nation inspects the sex characteristics of children to make sure it is not becoming aroused by childishness, and slyly hunts around to make sure its most untrustworthy members are not being so aroused, the more it risks creating a sexual fascination with the child. However you gaze, to accept the fantasy, or to assure yourself you see nothing, you join in an abomination.

  —

  We live in the afternoon of the sex children; Nabokov just saw the dawn.

  Now children from junior high to high school to college live in the most perfect sex environment devised by contemporary society—or so adults believe. Now they are inmates in great sex colonies where they wheel in circles holding hands with their pants down. Henry Darger, emblematic artist of our time with his girl armies, made for our sensibilities what Gauguin’s Tahitian beauties were to the French nineteenth-century bourgeoisie—repositories of true, voluptuous, savage, inner nature.

  Yet in public we want to believe that children are not prepared for sex as we are, do not understand it, and have a special, fragile, glassy truth inside them that will be endangered by premature use—as if the pearls of highest value for us, our chase after sex, our truth of “sexuality,” should not also be the treasure for them.

  It took the whole history of postwar American culture to make the sex child. It required a merging of old prurient fantasies, dating from the Victorians and the Progressives, with the actual sexual liberation of children after mid-century. You needed the expansion of the commercial market for children—selling to kids with sex as everything is sold with sex. You needed the bad faith of Madison Avenue advertisers and Seventh Avenue fashion writers. You needed the sinister prudery of Orange County evangelicalism and the paraliterature of child sex that arises in antipedophilia crusades (Treacherous Love; It Happened to Nancy)—erotica purveyed to middle-school libraries. You needed the Internet.

  Victorian child-loving is only loosely the background for our current preoccupation with the pedophile and the sexual child. With Lewis Carroll and Alice, John Ruskin and Rose La Touche, the fantastic young bride and her gauzy innocence, we know we are in the realm of adult prurience. It is child sexual liberation that transforms the current moment. We can no longer say it is only fantasy that exists about the sex lives of children. Or, rather—maybe this is the better way to say it—children have been insistently invited into our fantasy, too, and when they grow up they’ll furnish the adult continuity of this same madness.

  Is it necessary to say that the majority of the sex children we see and desire are not legally children? The representatives of the sex child in our entertainment culture are often eighteen to twenty-one—legal adults. The root of their significance is that their sexual value points backward, to the status of the child, and not forward to the adult. So there is Britney, famous at the age of eighteen for a grind video to “Oops!…I Did It Again” (“I’m not that innocent”), and Paris, nineteen years old in her amateur porn DVD (1 Night in Paris); alumnae of the Mickey Mouse Club like Christina, licking her lips at twenty on the Rolling Stone cover, miniskirt pulled open, with the headline “Guess What Christina Wants”; and Lindsay, veteran of Disney children’s films, whose breast size, extreme dieting, and accidental self-exposures on the red carpet are the stuff of Entertainment Tonight. It’s important that these are not adult “stars” in the way of Nicole Kidman or Julia Roberts; not called beautiful, rarely featured in adult films. Instead they furnish the core of entertainment news to two distinct audiences: children nine to fourteen, who enjoy their music and films on these works’ own terms, and adults who regard them—well, as what?

  Oddly, those of us who face these questions now have been sex children ourselves; we come after the great divide. You would think we’d remember. Our sex was handed to us, liberated, when we appeared in the world. We managed to feel like rebels with all the other twelve-year-olds, deluded, but not to be blamed for that. A great tween gang of sexual ruffians, trolling the basement TV for scrambled porn, tangling on couches, coming up for air in clouds of musk, shirts on backward; what did we learn? Having lived in the phantasm evidently does not diminish the phantasm. One still looks at those kids enviously; that is one of the mysteries to be solved. It is as if crossing the divide to adulthood entailed a great self-blinding in the act of seeing what is not, precisely, there; and forgetting what one oneself experienced. If we turn to the sex children as avidly as anyone, it must be because they are doing something for us, too, as participants in this society and as individuals. And the supplement will not be found in their childhood at all, but in the overall system of adult life.

  —

  The lure of a permanent childhood in America partly comes from the overwhelming feeling that one hasn’t yet achieved one’s true youth, because true youth would be defined by freedom so total that no one can attain it. Presumably even the spring-break kids, rutting, tanning, boozing with abandon, know there is a more perfect spring break beyond the horizon. Without a powerful aspiration to become adult, without some separate value that downplays childhood for sharper freedoms in age and maturity, the feeling of dissatisfaction can proceed indefinitely, in the midst of marriage, child rearing, retirement, unto death.

  The college years—of all times—stand out as the apex of sex childhood. Even if college is routinized and undemanding, it is still often residential, and therefore the place to perfect one’s life as a sex child. You move away from home into a setting where you are with other children—strangers all. You must be patient for four years just to get a degree. So there can be little to do but fornicate. Certainly from the wider culture, of MTV and rumor, you know four years is all you will get. Academic semesters provide interruptions between institutionalized sex jubilees: spring break, or just the weekends. The frat-house party assumes a gothic significance, not only for prurient adults but for the co
llegians themselves who report, on Monday, their decadence.

  As a college student today, you always know what things could be like. The Girls Gone Wild cameras show a world where at this very moment someone is spontaneously lifting her shirt for a logoed hat. You might think the whole thing was a put-on except that everyone seems so earnest. The most earnest write sex columns (“Sex and the Elm City”) in which the elite and joyless of Yale aspire to be like the déclassé and uninhibited of Florida State. The new full-scale campus sex magazines (e.g., Boston University’s Boink and Harvard’s H Bomb) seek truth in naked self-photography and accounts of sex with strangers as if each incident were God’s revelation on Sinai. The lesson each time is that sleeping with strangers or being photographed naked lets the authors know themselves better. Many of these institutions are driven by women. Perhaps they, even more than young men, feel an urgency to know themselves while they can—since America curses them with a premonition of disappointment: when flesh sags, freedom will wane.

  From college to high school, high school to junior high, the age of sex childhood recedes and descends. “The Sexual Revolution Hits Junior High,” says my newspaper, reporting as news what is not new. Twice a year Newsweek and Time vaunt the New Virginity. No one believes in the New Virginity. According to polls of those who stick with it, their abstinence is fortified with large measures of fellatio. Eighty percent of people have intercourse in their teens, says the Centers for Disease Control. (Why the Centers for Disease Control keeps records of sexual normalcy, unsmilingly pathologized as an “epidemic,” is its own question.) My newspaper tells me that menstruation starts for girls today at eleven, or as early as nine. No one knows why.

  Yet the early reality of sex childhood is its restrictive practical dimension. It exists only in the context of the large institutions that dominate children’s lives, the schools. In these prisonlike closed worlds of finite numbers of children, with no visible status but the wealth they bring in from outside (worn as clothes) and the dominance they can achieve in the activities of schooldays (friend making, gossiping, academic and athletic success), sex has a different meaning than in adult licentiousness or collegiate glory. Sex appeal is demanded long before sex, and when sex arrives, it appears within ordinary romantic relationships. New sexual acts are only substitutes for any earlier generation’s acts, as you’d expect. Where petting was, there shall fellatio be.

  It will simply never be the case that children can treat sex with the free-floating fantasy and brutality that adults can, because we adults are atomized in our dealings with others as children in school are not. If I do something rotten on a blind date, I never need to see the only witness again. A child does something rotten, and his date is sitting next to him in homeroom. The adult world sends down its sexual norms, which cannot blossom in a closed institution (though alarmists say they originate there), but which the children tuck away to fulfill just as soon as they can. Children are the beneficiaries of a culture that declares in all its television, jokes, talk, and advertising that if sex isn’t the most significant thing in existence, it is the one element never missing from any activity that is fun. They are watchers, silent, with open eyes, and they grow in the blue light.

  So much for the decadent reality of childhood.

  —

  But adults then look back from exile and see wrongly, thinking the children are free because we’ve hemmed them in with images of a transitory future freedom. Never mind that we ourselves led carnal lives that would make old men weep. Those lives hardly counted: inevitably we were caught in actual human relationships with particular people, in a matrix of leaden rules and personal ties. Envy of one’s sexual successors is now a recurrent feature of our portion of modernity. Philip Larkin:

  When I see a couple of kids

  And guess he’s fucking her and she’s

  Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,

  I know this is paradise

  Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—

  .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .

  …everyone young going down the long slide

  To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if

  Anyone looked at me, forty years back,

  And thought, That’ll be the life;

  .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .

  …He

  And his lot will all go down the long slide

  Like free bloody birds…

  (“High Windows”)

  Larkin’s solace in the poem was high windows and the icy blue; in real life, an enormous collection of pornography.

  The dirty magazines and their supposedly legitimate counterparts in fact play a significant role in the system of sex childhood. In Larkin’s life, the poetry of longing went hand in hand with the fulfillments of porn, and all of us share in this interchange at a more banal level. The colloquialisms “men’s magazines” and “women’s magazines” generally seem to name two very different sets of publications. “Women’s magazines” are instructional—how to display oneself, how to serve men, and nowadays (maybe always) how to steal sexual and emotional pleasure from men, outwitting them, while getting erotic and affective satisfactions, too, in the preparations for your self-display. “Men’s magazines,” for their part, are pornographic—how to look at women, how to fantasize about women, how to enjoy and dominate, and what one becomes while fantasizing this domination. The two genres are distinct, but continuous.

  The women’s advice and fashion magazines, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Elle, Vogue, hold a permanent mandate for an erotic youthfulness, though not literal sexual youth. They provide shortcuts to staying young for old and young alike: how to keep your skin young, how to keep your muscles young, how to keep your ideas young, how to feel perpetually young, how to siphon vitality from elsewhere to be “young” even if you’re not, literally, young, and how to use your youth if you are. You learn early what you’ll lose late, and get accustomed to denying the aging that you might never have minded as much without this help.

  Men’s magazines fix readers’ desires in the range of women’s shapes and bodies and modes of seduction and subordination—fragmenting the market by body part and sex act and level of explicitness, but also by age. Pornography has a special investment in youth. The college girl is a central feature of Playboy in its “Girls of the Big Ten” pictorials; Hustler has a relentless Barely Legal franchise in magazines and videos, aped by Just 18 and Finally Legal and all the bargain titles behind the convenience-store counter. In the demimonde of the Internet, an even more central category of all online pornography is “teen.” Of course it is profoundly illegal in the United States to photograph anyone under eighteen sexually; in what is called 2257 compliance, producers of pornography must keep public legal records proving that every model is eighteen or older. Technically, therefore, there are only two ages, eighteen and nineteen, at which “teen” models can be actual teens. Nor do the models ever seem to be sexually immature; child pornography doesn’t seem to be what the sites are for. Rather, putative teen models are made situationally immature—portrayed with symbols of the student life, the classroom, the cheerleading squad, the college dorm, the family home, the babysitting, the first job; not the husband, not the child, not the real-estate brokerage or boardroom or bank office, never adult life.*1

  Thus a society that finds it illegal to exploit anyone beneath the age of legal majority is at the same time interested in the simulation of youth—often by people who are sexually mature but still only on the cusp of adulthood. And in its legitimate publications, as in its vice, it encourages a more general, socially compulsory female urgen
cy to provision youth across the life span, and a male rush to take it.

  Though the young person has never been old, the old person once was young. When you look up the age ladder, you look at strangers; when you look down the age ladder, you are always looking at versions of yourself. As an adult, it depends entirely on your conception of yourself whether those fantastic younger incarnations will seem long left behind or all-too-continuous with who you are now. And this conception of yourself depends, in turn, on the culture’s attitudes to adulthood and childhood, age and youth. This is where the trouble arises. For in a culture to which sex furnishes the first true experiences, it makes a kind of sense to return to the ages at which sex was first used to pursue experience and one was supposedly in a privileged position to find it. Now we begin to talk, not about our sex per se, but about a fundamental change in our notion of freedom, and what our lives are a competition for.*2

  We must begin to talk directly about the change that was well begun in Nabokov’s day and is well advanced in ours, the transformation that created the world in which we are both freed and enslaved. That was sexual liberation.

  —

  Liberation implies freedom to do what you have already been doing or have meant to do. It unbars what is native to you, free in cost and freely your possession, and removes the iron weight of social interdiction. Even in the great phase of full human liberation that extended from the 1960s to the present day, however, what has passed as liberation has often been liberalization. (Marcuse used this distinction.) Liberalization makes for a free traffic in goods formerly regulated and interdicted, creating markets in what you already possess for free. It has a way of making your possessions no longer native to you at the very moment that they’re freed for your enjoyment. Ultimately you no longer know how to possess them, correctly, unless you are following new rules that emerge to dominate the traffic in these goods.