The cult of the child

Provocative and thought-provoking questions from Anne Higonnet:

Childhood innocence has become a talisman adults hold up against all evil, doubt and despair. No – not all childhood innocence – only childhood sexual innocence. In Canadian law, images of children having any kind of physical harm done to them are treated in the same way as child pornography, but this is an exception. In the secular West, the ideal of childhood sexual innocence has become sacred. It cannot be questioned in any way, shape or form. In such a climate, who would dare to openly make pictures that involve children's or adolescents' bodies or their sexuality at all?

Higonnet's assertion that childhood innocence is a talisman is accurate. It led me to realize that the difference on this issue between the West and the rest of the world is that in other countries, childhood innocence is much more about boyhood than girlhood in the sense that girls stop being children to become women as soon as they "awake" sexual desires within men. This means for example that in those parts of the world, what would be considered pedophilia would be sexual activities with boys not girls who after all always instinctively know how to lure men with their bodies.

The cult of the child and the use of their innocence have more to do with adults than with children. Parents are obsessed with the notion that their kids must be innocent for the contrary notion would scare them shitless out their minds. It would mean that they are not in control of the little people they brought into this world and that good and protective parenting can produce bad children, which is a threatening idea for modern societies because it makes crime and punishment more complicated. Sex and innocence in the human mind don't go hand and hand because sex is considered dangerous and dirty especially when its sole goal is pleasure and self-gratification.