Yesterday, it seemed as if the saga of Jack McClellan was the only story on the local AM airwaves. McClellan, for those of you who never watch Fox News or listen to right-wing AM radio, is a self-identified pedophile who has managed to stay scrupulously within the bounds of the law while advocating for man-girl love.
McClellan is a rather pathetic character, and not the subject of this blog post. How men talk about him is.
Yesterday evening, while driving to Pilates, I caught the beginning of the “Al Rantel show” on KABC 790. I don’t listen to conservative talk radio often, but I check in every once in a while. (I’m not trying to work myself up into a lather of lefty indignation; I just think it worthwhile to “keep tabs” on what the right is thinking and saying.) Rantel led off his show with a discussion of Jack McClellan, and spent nearly ten minutes describing what he (Rantel) would do to McClellan if he had a chance. “I’d break his camera over his nasty head and take my chances with a jury. No jury with parents on it would convict me.” (Interesting how some on the right, so theoretically in love with the American system of jurisprudence, are quite happy to call for jury nullification when it suits their interests.)
When I got home last night, I took the chinchillas out in their play room. We have a small TV in the chin room, and I read the New York Review of Books with half an eye and watched the tube with another half. (One full eye carefully monitors the babies during their out time.) I paused briefly on Fox News, and listened to old Oliver North introduce his segment about McClellan. The former Marine officer reminded all of us that before he was a sanctimonious talking head, he had been “trained to kill for a living”. He declared that if he saw McClellan anywhere near his “two lovely grand-daughters”, he’d murder him on the spot. North’s two guests did not challenge him.
I’m struck by the way in which both Rantel and North felt compelled to threaten McClellan with physical violence. Indeed, neither was capable of raising the real issue (which is McClellan’s first amendment right to be open about his attraction to young girls) without first declaring that if given the chance, he would take the law into his own hands. It’s cheap vigilantilism, of course, but it’s something more: it’s a specific kind of macho posturing. Both North and Rantel reaffirm their own masculinity by detailing their willingness to use violence. It’s stunningly puerile.
In American adolescent “boy culture”, a great deal of conversation traditionally revolves around the question of “who can kick who’s ass.” Threats of physical violence, detailed discussions of what one intends to do to one’s perceived rivals, are far more common among many middle-class boys in their teens than actual scraps. Among the young, a “beat-down” or an “ass-kicking” (or, more often, the threat thereof) is used to mark the boundaries of what is acceptable male behavior. When a boy “crosses the line” in the eyes of his peers, he will be threatened with physical violence. Most adult men who survived junior high school remember how the language of beatings was often more pervasive than the beatings themselves. As boys age, they are less likely to judge themselves by their ability to kick each other’s asses — and more likely to use sexual prowess with women as the yardstick with which to measure their own anxious masculinity.
North and Rantel would no doubt dismiss me as an effete urban intellectual, the very embodiment of a member of the coastal blue state elite whom they despise. (Gender studies? Chinchillas? Dual citizen? Pilates? The New York Review of Books? Veganism? I wouldn’t dare tell them I learned to drive on Ford pickups, dipped Skoal, listened to “Alabama” and am still pretty damn comfortable in a Western saddle.) North and Rantel would surely insist that they aren’t posturing, but rather expressing their willingness to “protect little girls from predators.” But of course, “protecting vulnerable women” is the excuse non pareil for issuing physical threats.
When I listen to men like Oliver North and Al Rantel, I don’t hear genuine worry about little girls as their primary concern. Both North and Rantel mentioned their desire to protect girls only briefly, and went on at much greater length about their own fantasies of doing physical violence to Jack McClellan. Their real focus was less on the threat to young women, and more on rhapsodizing about what they’d do and how they’d do it (and in Rantel’s case, how he’d get away with it.) In a world where the pedophile is (perhaps rightly) the most maligned figure of all, he is the perfect tool for pundits like these talk show hosts. The horridness of a pedophile’s identity, the particular details of his sexuality, make him a rare thing in contemporary public life: a figure against whom threats of murder can be made openly and fearlessly. McClellan is the ideal punching bag through whom these microphone jockeys can prove to all just how manly, brave, and virtuous they are. It’s seventh grade all over again.
What amuses me about some on the right is how self-righteously protective they are of little girls — and how willing they are to tolerate the abuse of young women just a few years older than McClellan’s targets. The Norths and Rantels of the world are the ones who decry the “feminist sex police” who “scream date rape” on college campuses. The Norths and the Rantels of the world were vociferous defenders of the Duke lacrosse team, who while apparently not guilty of rape, were certainly guilty of the sexual exploitation of a working-class African American stripper. (And guess what, folks? Any comments about the Duke case will be deleted. Not the topic here.)
Let’s be blunt here: the only difference between McClellan and a hell of a lot of men is that the former wants to have sex with girls who are pre-pubescent, while the latter are often attracted to girls still well below voting age. But the arrival of puberty is not the same as the arrival of emotional maturity. A fully-developed fifteen year-old girl is likely to be ogled by a great many older men (ask her about the wolf whistles sometime.) The eight year-olds on whom McClellan is fixated are children, deserving of protection. We are right to be appalled by the content of the fantasies he shares publicly, though we are not right to threaten him with harm. But the arrival of menarche and the development of secondary sex characteristics do not mark as rigid a line between the “pedophile” and the “normal red-blooded American male” as some imagine.
We live in a culture that fetishizes the bodies of teen girls. The most popular niche in pornography, we’re told, focuses on “barely legal” teen girls. The implication is that the men who frantically masturbate to the images of those who’ve just turned eighteen would love to be looking at much younger girls, but are held back by fear of legal repercussions and lack of easy access. How many adult men — say in their thirties or forties — are enraged that McClellan is drawn to ten year-olds, while these same men stare at high-school cheerleaders just a handful of years older than the pedophile’s targets? A ten year-old is a child; a fifteen year-old is a child. The fact that the latter may have gone through puberty in no way makes an adult man’s sexual attraction to her any more legitimate. The end of childhood is determined more by emotional maturity than by the arrival of breasts and menses, after all.
I’ll be the first to admit that I am disgusted by Jack McClellan, though I wish him no harm. But I am also disgusted by the legions of men (of whom Ollie North and Al Rantel are only two famous examples) who brag about their desire to beat the pulp out of McClellan while sanctioning the sexualization of girls just a few brief years older than McClellan’s targets. One wonders if there isn’t an element of self-loathing and guilt in the hate that’s directed towards a pedophile like Mr. McClellan.
If we’re going to protect our children, folks, let’s protect all of them. That includes those who’ve gone through puberty. And if we’re going to call a man “sick” for being attracted to a child who is, say, eight years below the age of consent, let’s apply the same term to the men who are drawn to those eight days below that same demarcation line.
Addendum: To continue my point, read this old post of mine about National Review columnist John Derbyshire. Derbyshire, who is considerably older than I am, opined in 2005:
It is, in fact, a sad truth about human life that beyond our salad days, very few of us are interesting to look at in the buff. Added to that sadness is the very unfair truth that a woman’s salad days are shorter than a man’s — really, in this precise context, only from about 15 to 20.
Bold emphasis mine. So what’s the moral distinction between McClellan, who likes ten year-olds, and Derbyshire, who likes ‘em at fifteen?
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