Like Ken Park's director, Larry Clark, Germaine Greer deliberately provokes controversy with the cheapest trick. If there's a taboo left, she'll break it, and since one of the few remaining taboos in Western liberal democracies is pedophilia, that's the arena she's most recently entered.
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Asked on Canadian television what attracted her to "boys" rather than men, she said: "Sperm that runs like tap water will do."
Once you get over the hypocrisy of the godmother of 1970s feminism salivating over boys as sex objects, you are left with the fact that Greer is using the language of pedophiles.
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Larry Clark, the 59-year-old twice-divorced director of censored movie Ken Park, the latest baby boomer cause celebre, makes his art according to the Moody motto.
Interviewed on the 7.30 Report this week, he talked about himself as if he were one of the "kids" he makes movies about: "When we're kids and we're getting nothing that we need from the grown-ups around us, I think the only thing which keeps us going is we have each other.""I started making films and everybody said, 'Gee, there's certain rules ... You can't do this, you can't do that, you have to do it this way.' When I hear that, I say I'm not going to do it that way."
What a rebel. What an achievement to break a Hollywood taboo and film an erect penis. But what Clark and Greer and Moody and other aged taboo vandals refuse to see is that taboos, or immutable moral laws, were developed for the protection of the most vulnerable members of society. You just have to read prison psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple's book, Life at the Bottom, to understand that avant-garde throwing off of moral shackles and family "values" by the well-off and educated has had especially disastrous consequences for the British underclass and, of course, children.
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I would rather wear a burqa than have my eight-year-old child become a sex object.
Miranda Devine Sydney (AU) Morning Heraldlink from Follow Me Here
indent {"Hollywood taboo". as though it's the film industry that has created this taboo and sustained it. the first thing I want to say is none of the public reaction to and discussion about pedophilia would be possible if it weren't for the early champions of 'gay rights'. the men and women who went up against some of the deepest sickness of this age. and it's easy to forget especially if you weren't old enough to be there,as late as the 60's homosexual love was indistinguishable from paedophilia. it still is in the minds of many people in America. the second thing I want to say is, what makes paedophilia a crime, or more importantly, what makes it morally wrong, is the damage that it does. it is the refusal to confront that that makes the reaction of the mainstream ineffectual at best. because it's the sex that bothers most people. children are 'innocent'. sex is evil. children plus sex equals evil. though in a debate the defenders of innocence would insist that sex in marriage is gloriously sacred. as though a legal contract alone can work such a spiritually profound miracle. remove the sex from the equation and you have, children and damage. the problem with seeing it that way is it becomes too easy to see other forms of damage to children as equally morally wrong. forms of damage that are essential to the day-to-day business of the world as it now runs. a nine year old child working with toxic chemicals, with unsafe machinery, under brutal conditions, under cruel overseers, for a salary that only augments her family's starvation wages. a nine year old child with her legs spread to some tourist in a cheap hotel. damage. to the soul to the body, they're hard to distinguish without a God-like view. and for all the cameras and surveillance technology and all its increasing deployment, no one has that view, no one can measure it. but anyone can see it. damage. and most bitter, so many of the victims are cast away by the same moral champions who bring their personal sicknesses to the crusade. the real moral problem is the adaptability of children, that there are places and situations where children are exploited as completely as anything could be, but they aren't harmed in an immediate and observable way. that template fits too closely the culture around us, the educational systems, the 'media', the institutional religions that occupy so much of the moral real estate of this time. because exploiting children, using them, conditioning them, is what takes place all around us every day. sacrificing the child's long term, virtually unlimited potential for immediate gratification, destroying the possibility of growth, of the young becoming more than we can see, more than we can name, to preserve our own security, what difference does it make if there's sex involved?
the difference is that the people reacting to these things are sexually ill. the 'filthiest' word in the current lexicon is the one that describes the act which created each one of us. the 'dirty' parts of a woman's body are the organs which feed a child, and the organs which gather the seed to create that child. a woman's breasts are dirty, a man's are not. there's no need for more proof. that is an inherited sickness. hiding it, hiding from it, pretending it isn't there perpetuates it, and increases the damage.}
