My third FAQ is about the frequent conflation of homosexuals with paedophiles or ‘child sexual offenders’ as they are called. Historically, this is linked to the little-understood practice of man-boy love in Greek culture which as Foucault shows us in his painstaking second and third volumes of his history of sexuality had little or nothing to do with sexual identity or even sexuality. Nevertheless, the European adoption of Classical Greece as its mythical model of origin came with a whitewashing of this practice, a Christian denunciation of it. One of the
derogatory French words for gay is ‘pédé’ and it comes from pederasty, or the practice of man-boy love, easily conflatable with a practice reprehensible to the hypocritical European mind: paedophilia.
I say hypocritical because while Europeans, and, on a much more hysterical scale, Americans, are terrified of this practice and want to ‘save the children’ (as many such campaigns in these countries are entitled) from it, they will not accept that this practice is at the heart of the heterosexual complex, that most ‘offenders’ are indeed heterosexual men and the ‘victims’ are young girls, often daughters, nieces and cousins’ children, most often within the context of incest, another unexamined taboo. So, one of the first ways to answer this charge from the homosexual point of view is to point out that most paedophiles are actually heterosexuals.
The second is to say that homosexuals are two adult consenting individuals and paedophiles are abusers of children, two distinct conceptual categories. While this is stated clearly (the Delhi High Court judgment on 377, for example, states clearly that adult consensual sex is all it is talking about) in legal language, there is no examination of the rather arbitrary category of the ‘adult.’ The linear language of the law is not capable of that examination.
But going beyond these two defences, we need to ask several more uncomfortable and possibly dangerous (given the amount of high moralising whack jobs out there, and even moderates and liberals begin to shudder if you talk about paedophile rights, by the way) questions. Nevertheless, I feel it is important to ask them: When does one become an adult? Is child marriage, a long-standing practice in India not a form of institutionalised paedophilia? Doesn’t the construction of the child as a pure victim rob the child of all agency in the business of the negotiation of sexuality? (Ranjitha Gunasekaran’s recent article in i.witness quotes unnamed ‘experts’ who believe that the child is ‘groomed’ into complicit victimhood — implying that children are incapable of complicity.) Do we, over a hundred years after Freud, still deny the fact that a child has a sexuality and sexual drives? Must we respond to that idea the way the conservative Europeans responded to Freud? Further, following Freud, isn’t it obvious that everybody’s initiation into sexuality is traumatic, that most sexual encounters, even with willing consenting adults are part coercion and part consent? Power is part of all sexuality.
So, I am going to suggest that perhaps the way to answer this FAQ is not to hasten to distinguish between homosexuality and paedophilia (with the explicit assumption being that the homos are the good guys and the child sex guys the bad ones) but to argue that
homosexuality may sometimes have a lot to do with paedophilia, and, further, that if it is based on mutual consent, it is no big deal. In the Netherlands, where Heum, the recent offender hauled into jail in Chennai, there is a group fighting for paedophile rights. The Netherlands is one of the most sexually progressive parts of the world and we should perhaps think about why it exists.
I think we ought to recognise that children (younger than the legal age of 16 in some places, 18 in others, when they suddenly and miraculously become adults/agents, capable of complicity in a sexual act) can be complicit and willing subjects of sexual acts when they are, say, 10 and some arbitrary legal cut-off is just absurd. Indeed, an indication of this arbitrariness is the fact that the legal age ranges across the globe from 9 to 18. I think we ought to recognise that man-boy or woman-girl love can be beautiful and men, homosexual or otherwise, do not have a copyright on desiring children. The hidden history of women messing with little boys and girls in India needs to be written.
And finally that the question is of consent vs abuse, not gay vs straight in this issue at all. Heum clearly did not ask the consent of these kids before putting their pictures on the net and we do not know whether he asked them whether they were interested in doing, and being done to, whatever he was doing. That’s the issue and that’s why he’s in jail. And, by the way, Heum was doing boys and girls.
What a man might do with a boy or a woman with a girl need not be Heum-like at all. It might be a beautiful thing. And if you disagree then on that, we need to begin a discussion on it, not have hysterical rightwing illiteracy and condemnation.
-- Ashley Tellis is an academic. Feedback to this article can be sent to failedsubjectivty@gmail.com