"12 Year Old Girls Don't Know What They Want."

(NOTE: I know that I should be posting on Monday, but a recent interaction is fresh on my mind and so I don’t see any harm in dong so a few days earlier.)

So I was drinking amongst friends and acquaintances at probably my favorite bar in San Francisco (coincidentally about a two-minute walk from my place, which has probably saved my life after more than a few games of beer pong as well as 50 cent PBR nights).  One of the guys at the table—a good acquaintance if not outright friend of mine—brought up a tale about a young man that I didn’t know, but that the majority of the table seemed familiar with.

My friend proceeded to talk about how he doesn’t really talk to this dude anymore, and in his defense, he said something along the lines of, “Dude, he’s a pedophile.”  “Child molester” was definitely another term he used to describe said estranged friend/acquaintance of his.  Let’s just refer to said-perpetrator as Chester for clarity’s sake.

To elaborate further, he explained the situation to my roommate and I (paraphrasing): Chester was 19 years old when he had sex with a 12 year old girl (I forget if she was his girlfriend or not), and how Chester had freaked out because he thought he got her pregnant.  I think my friend also said something about Chester doing some time as a result, but I don’t remember.

The disclosure of ages between Chester and his victim (let’s call her Tracey so I don’t keep referring to her in the abstract) seemed to do the trick with the rest of my merry, buzzed cohort, prompting one to say, “It’s not consensual.”  Immediately the problematic aspects of quantifying consent came to my mind, but not necessarily in defense of Chester and Tracey’s activities, which I really don’t want to attempt to address with this blog post.  Fresh with this week’s EDUC 805 readings on my mind, I thought about what “consent” meant to my new acquaintance: did he mean that it was not consensual because of the age disparity, or did he mean that it was not consensual because 12 year olds (read: 12 year old girls) aren’t able to give consent in any sexual contexts?  I wasn’t really in the mood to take this a step further, but my storyteller friend happened to at least give his interpretation of adolescent female desire and agency:

“12 year old girls don’t know what they want.”  Bingo.  Hello blog topic.

It just so happens that fresh on my mind has been the continual coverage of the Jaycee Lee Dugard/Phillip (and Nancy) Garrido case, or should I say the newest episode of “Abducted White Middle-Class Children” that has been aired within U.S. collective memory and discourse (hey, it’s a rerun but NOW with an improved, shocking and yet mostly-happy ending!  Stay tuned for grotesque accounts of the pedophile’s lair, the pain of Jaycee’s family, the dumbfoundedness of Garrido’s acquaintances and how they would’ve never suspected as much, and a fundraiser concert in South Lake Tahoe!  You can almost lick the tears off of your television screen or computer monitor!  Of course, there’s always room for another sequel…)

My profound sarcasm and insensitivity aside, I have been very nervous about what such a unique yet typical account of child kidnapping and molestation getting so much media airplay.  While radically different from my aforementioned example of Chester and Tracey, here we have another instance of culturally (re)defining and reifying the binary notions of lack of desire and perverted desire.  Phil Garrido (Chester?) is another great example of everything the U.S. fears and despises (Nancy is a more problematized figure that the public doesn’t know whether to feel hatred or empathy for, which is an interesting blog topic in itself), as Jaycee (Tracey?) is an example of who everyone rallies for and wishes to protect.  Protect that innocent (white) female body and mind from contamination.  Deliver us from evil, or at least deliver them from Antioch.  I hear there’s plenty of room for them in East San Jose.

I’m not trying to be provocative to the point that I’m belittling Jaycee’s incredibly painful journey through adolescence into adulthood and motherhood, nor do I mean to mock the pain that her family, friends, and anyone else impacted has gone through.  I hope you folks have caught onto that.  Nor am I trying to address Chester and Tracey’s circumstances directly.  I’m more concerned in what they—or should I say, what their labels of “choiceless victimized girl” and “soulless perpetrating man”—mean in the larger context of addressing young people’s (especially young women’s) own capabilities, experiences, and understandings of sexual agency and desire.  These labels are obviously incredibly interdependent, and I would argue we now can’t have one (profound denial of childhood sexualities and desires) without the other (profound hatred of sex offenders, who seem more and more likely to invoke the image of a Phil Garrido or Chester the molester than, say, a college student who gets his girlfriend drunk and coerces her into having sex with him…oh, wait, they’re of age and in a relationship, so it’s *probably* consensual).

I’m concerned about how these labels of “child molester” and “child victim” become static variables so solidified by cultural anger and notions of sexless childhood and oversexed pedophilia that to even attempt to detangle some of these inferences would be to question the very moral fabric of the United States of an Abstinence-Only and Pedophile-Free America.  To complicate or even challenge these nice, neat binary frameworks would be—depending on the company involved—to solicit a McCarthyist eyebrow raise, if not full-blown inquisition, accusations of political correctness (if not worse), or further claims as to how the graphic details and bizarre circumstances of such cases “prove” said theories of victimized girls’ lack of self-autonomy and predatory men’s lack of humanity.

There’s obviously a lot of cultural fear and anger involving any suggestion that young folks have any semblance of what we consider “sexuality,” because we (adults) continue to define children’s experiences and subjectivities against our own.  Therefore (and while admitting that I’m not taking enough time to problematize respective heteronormative, racialized, and classed notions of childhood innocence), kids can’t really experience intimacy, they don’t know what “love” is, they’re not mature enough to handle the consequences of sex, and, by logical extension, “12 year old girls don’t know what they want.”  How we ever get to a point where we can talk about youth’s sexual desires, pleasures, and subjectivities (better yet, let young folks talk about their sexualities themselves without shame or discouragement!) in their appropriate contexts, in their own language and terms, and not automatically reducing it all as being problematic or inauthentic due to our own anxieties and fears, is a question that I feel needs to be at least partially addressed by this generation of sex educators, because if we can’t do our part to deconstruct cultural anxieties surrounding the Chesters and Traceys in a sex-negative nation that needs its victims and perpetrators in order to keep everything clear and uncomplicated, goodness knows Freud wasn’t/isn’t the answer.

P.S. If anyone knows how I can type up my blog posts on a separate Word document (I don't trust typing them up directly on Dialogues and have already lost a few posts that way on iLearn) and then copy-and-paste without the font getting all funky, I'd appreciate your blog sophistication.