Good Sex Illustrated (17 page)

Because the prohibition that strikes a blow against pederasty is a simple corollary to the one in this country that condemns both homosexuality and the sexuality of minors, it’s also a corollary of the law that gives parents the ownership and exclusive utilization of their progeny. If the pedophile is the object of the most violent repression, the fiercest condemnation, it’s because he violates these three assumptions that are at the basis of our entire sexual order. Consequently, those homosexuals who want to win acceptance exonerate themselves from being pederasts and denounce them as the only “real” perverts; adolescents who want the right to love solemnly vow to interest themselves only in conjugal pleasures; and as for the parents, they’re prohibiting incest or at least getting credited for it in advance.

Training for the sexual order means implanting these three principles in children. It’s impossible to name, honestly depict a forbidden sexuality, which would reveal that only arbitrary social powers have created laws that are being attributed to nature—a sexuality that, in addition (I’ll come back to this later), has the peculiarity of very often and to the letter exploiting the patterns of marketable sexuality and the mechanisms of parental power—in other words, the very indoctrination of the child and the details of his status. The pedophile goes beyond being simply a pervert, a squanderer: he’s the father’s rival. Nothing is closer to the Order, and it has no greater enemy; hardly have we mentioned the pedophile before we’re already dissecting the parent-child relationship. Jean’s dad narrowly misses that pitfall when he says that the
niceness
of the pedophile is
a trap
: a lot of children already know that when it comes to adults (parents, teachers or managers) being
extremely nice
almost always hides a dirty trick about to be played on you. Will they guess that the
niceness
of the authors of the
Encyclopedia
is also hiding
a trap
, and that it goes way beyond those we’d imagined being offered children?

Keep quiet about pedophilia and yet ward off its “threat”; through it, fix in your sights any inclination toward emancipation on the part of the minor: that’s what the big man in the black raincoat, this sad old guy dressed like a poor person, is for—this pitiful state of Temptation, well designed to disgust the child enough to keep him from ever succumbing. So that’s what having a sexuality is? So it’s not being like everybody else? That’s pleasure? When you desire, that’s what you look like? When you’re desired, that’s what you’re subjected to? Disobeying your parents means becoming that? Going out to the street, being outside, being alone and free means meeting that? When an adult is interested in children it’s to
get even?
Behind all the boys, girls, all the people who speak to me, behind all the passersby Outside, all the ones who don’t walk quickly by ignoring me, this is what there is?

A lovely lesson, to be sure, that will certainly help children
avoid unpleasant surprises
, and make
the sex life a terrible secret
or
a mystery
for them.

I fear, however, that the buckle of fear may be forever buckled and that, may I add, the
mystery
closes over this coat that is opening. And I wonder how many well-neutered children sent on the run by an exhibitionist will only have been fleeing their own future. Terror lasts, in the same way for the child feeling guilty for having seen as for the old guy feeling guilty for having shown; and the former has to be the surest path to the latter. Because only one system for seeing a penis can terrify and traumatize the child: the one of total prohibition and absolute culpability.

Let’s admire the two faces of the poor man, the two “monsters” that will instill horror where there is none: the Exhibitionist, who gets “a little pleasure” from making the child feel
fear
, and the Sadist who has “a need to harm him.”

In truth, sadists, child killer-torturers are extremely rare; the law practically never gets hold of them, and family journalism, which loves dismemberment, resigns itself to raking through the five continents to offer its readers one or two per year. A necessary task: it upholds the family myth of the Stranger, of the Man-Who-Kills, so that the image of sadism can do an impeccable job of covering over that of the pedophile, and so that, in current parlance, the word “sadist” can serve to indicate any caresser of little girls or boys— except for old grannies.

As for exhibitionists, despite my many walks in parks, I’ve never seen one at work: guess I’m too old. In any case, and Dad himself admits it, they’re
inoffensive.

However, lets remove these two masks and remind ourselves what they’re hiding: pederasts looking for young boys in order to have sex with them, for a quickie or also involving friendship.

Looking for consenting minors involves some frightful practices: you have to “speak to children” and even be “extremely nice,” because “unknown people” always frighten them. Actually, pedophiles only “attract” boys who are free with themselves and who are interested in it. When it’s a matter of a mutual itch, you understand each other quickly, and if you don’t, you say hello.

I haven’t yet read about a rejected queer starting to “follow” the child while polishing his big knife. Sometimes he insists? If there were no “mystery” in morals, no panic, no risk of prison, but legitimate information, in this case, an invitation, the response could be expressed clearly, openly, without insisting and without anxiety. But in our society, when an adult encounters a child, two fears come to the fore—and the most terrifying one isn’t what you think.

For such a search entails innumerable difficulties: cruising is a primitive state—excuse me, I mean it’s “crime” on the prowl.
Hangingaround primary schools and high schools,
and in the streets, swimming pools, parks, train stations, movie theaters, at urinals: wherever outsiders of every shape and kind spontaneously gather. A wearing form of survival for some, a dangerous, embittered existence. I’ve already described how the bourgeois pedophile avoids it.

In addition, you wriggle out of it at the bottom—among the humiliated, the poor, the unsightly, the shy—by sneaking away. You succumb to fear, omnipresent physical fear. After thirty or fifty years of frustration, anxiety, you make yourself some armor (the black coat): self-punishment, guilt, self-loathing. Desire changes into torment, you’re condemned to awkward, panicked, pathetic “acting out”—for example, exhibitionism. An acting out that is so unrealistic that it soon lands you in the hands of nice people and the cops.

No need for the child to
explain the situation:
it is very true that passersby
understand immediately.
They understand that they’re getting the ideal victim, the perfect monster, the one whose hand kills as soon as it touches. According to the contemporary sexual order, this dangerous crazy is exactly the same thing as the nineteenth-century bourgeois order’s stealer of bread: the absolute criminal, the man to bring down. That isn’t what the law stipulates, but honest folks’ “understanding” is unanimous about it. Those who live to walk all over people, strangle children and exploit inequality to the point of drawing blood are actually outraged that such people would dare “go after somebody weaker than them.”

Such childish “weakness” is highly valued: the fangs and claws of twenty million adults are spiking from every inch of its skin, and whoever touches it immediately risks his own. No wonder why the faggot takes off if the “victim” calls out. That flight proves that he’s
cowardly
and that he has criminal intentions—if not he would have stuck around to quietly explain the situation to the nice witnesses, to be sure.

Sexuality that has, as Dad says,
never reached a normal stage,
it tears itself apart a little more as each year passes, and it doesn’t “develop” very much. Instead of feeling sorry for “perverts” that no one
tried to understand
when they were children, it would be better to point out that everyone is determined to crush them once they’re adults. In my opinion, the latter is the decisive factor. But Dad and I aren’t on the same wavelength: he meant that a well-adjusted child doesn’t become a pervert. “Perversion,” then, the refusal of an arbitrary sexual order, will only be a very regrettable disease. And psycho-whatevers will cheerfully draw up an inventory—in the spirit of a mythical “scientific” good conscience—of the behavioral disturbances, the manias, the failures, the neuroses that a life of loneliness and persecution causes the deviant, and that proves his “disease.” The most surprising thing about it is that most of the outlaws endure, and aren’t destroyed by, a sexual and social system that would drive the majority of “normal” people to suicide or an asylum after just a few weeks.

Rich perverts and poor perverts aren’t at all the same thing; all freedoms can be bought, and so can this one, but it costs a little more.

Between the options of the powerful and the setbacks of poverty, petit bourgeois pederasts find an institutional refuge in professions offering power over childhood. Primary high school teaching, the priesthood, there’s a choice. They represent the parents, they divert their power, hide behind it, they fashion a weapon out of it and the kid can only submit. They are the Order.

That fashion of surviving is especially odious, because of the collaboration it implies and the coercion it inflicts upon the child-object, while taking advantage of the status and rights it receives from the family. Of course, it’s no more disgusting than any other absue in the name of any other desire. An institutional relationship to the child allows this kind of queer to avoid illegal cruising and pitiful seduction scenes. He’s aware that you can’t attract a child by showing him what he has learned to fear the most. The action of showing was replacing that of touching, it was like a preliminary for it that is discontinued, a pawing of the ground, a reversion, a kind of rehabilitated gesture, a way to redeem a desire eating away at you, a way to live it differently. The pederast-educator figures out that children are much less taken aback by being touched: they know what that is, and a lot of them are hardly alarmed by it. If you want to be privatized, you always give in to Dad—I mean, to the Power with a hundred heads, the law of the strongest. Kids are used to higher authorities—adults—fondling them for any pretext at all, from their little familial spankings to the tugging of their medical balls; the teach’s, priest’s hand will only be one more grope, it’s the life of the slave.

Dad doesn’t use his fingers, that’s what distinguishes him from pederast-educators: he has an iron or velvet glove, but it’s a glove. We saw Jean bare-naked with his dad bare-naked, and they were talking about somebody showing his little thing; it was this “innocent” context “without shame” that made the conversation so amusing. Jean was saying that he was
scared to look at a penis
and he
looked away.
What did he see? An open fly; in other words, crime. What does he see at home? Dad without his pants; in other words, law. An unknown person has been deprivatized, “divulged” for him—and Jean was afraid of being touched, as if that were the logical consequence of it.

The deprivatization of the man seemed to call for that of the child—who has learned not to be deprivatized except within his family, in an asexual context. Father and son, naked in front of each other, have no genitals for each other; and when Jean sees his dad’s cock, he doesn’t need to look away, because there’s nothing to see. The stranger is dad without that cancellation.

Even comparing the photos is meaningful. Within the family, Jean looks at the faces of those who are naked. In the park, Jean ignores the face of the dressed gentleman, but stares at his fly.

In his former soldier’s cap, the old man in the park is nothing other than a statue of parental power. He incarnates its cruelty and reveals paradoxically what’s at stake in it. The fear that he inspires is felt by any child in front of adults who break their own laws, such as he has learned them.

And first in front of his parents. At home, coexistence is based on strict rules, skillful submissions, calculations, little daily deals. But everything can explode at any time, and his parents transform into wild beasts from whom there is no escape. Dad-Mom, as punishers or furies, suddenly become people who take “a little pleasure” in causing fear, who “get even,” and who have a “horrible need to harm little boys or little girls.” Nearly all children have experienced such sadism; and the boogeyman is—much more than outside strangers—that stranger lurking inside the father, who makes a monstrous appearance from time to time. But the child subjected to such family violence can’t
shout, call for help:
papa exercises his power, and there’s no getting away from it.

This is where the man in the black coat achieves his true reality. A pathetic addition to parental abuse, he becomes the symbol of it in the child’s imagination. You run away from him as you’d like to run away from the father; only a few children are sometimes fascinated by him—less out of confidence than out of excess of submission. And the reason that the father puts them on guard against these men is because these false images-to-obey resemble him.
Since you’re children, you cant identify them:
what he wants to say is that there are dads everywhere giving out toys, presents, candy, who invite you into their car; careful, these are booby-trapped dads. The only good one is me.

But the child who has the best chance of remembering such a warning, the most ignorant child, the most docile (for example, Jean), is also the one that men-like-dad will catch in the “trap” by showing that they’re not mean like Dad is. Whereas the children who distrust adults, detest Dad and are rearing under the yoke (like the “big guy from eighth grade”) are the ones who shrug and keep walking when an adult whom they don’t like bothers them.

Yes, that’s what I said: whom they don’t like. This is what bothers the families. Runaways quickly discover that the outside is full of refuges and inhabited by detestable or likeable human beings who aren’t dangerous, and certain of whom can play the role of parents. The middle class pederast will be as usable as a father, and according to a similar deal: to buy his protection, the children or adolescents will have to give in to him, submit their sex to him, as they do for the father; but instead of being castrated, they’ll only be harnessed, and will have to live dependant rather than as someone quashed. The sexual rivalry between parents and pederasts represents the alternation between two options for a child’s domestic survival. In countries where pederasty is tolerated, the wealthy queer, whether he be a tourist or not, in a poor boy’s eyes becomes the economic complement of parents, the one who might extract him from a life without future, from an otherwise irremediable destitution; the one who’ll pay for his studies and make him… a father of a middle class family. To put it briefly, the homosexual protector offers, outside the family, what that family can’t give. It’s no longer a question of each according to his birth, but of each according to his pretty face. It’s not that different, in fact it’s altogether the same—but it’s in addition.