(no subject)

So maybe staying up late and reading books about abuse isn't my best bet for a healthy and happy lifestyle.

I'm currently reading Jame's R. Kincaid's Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molestation for the revision of the Alice paper that I presented at ICFA.  The book was recommended to me by a number of people, and it really does dovetail nicely with the argument I'm making: basically, I'm arguing that as a culture, we've aged Alice in order to excuse our fascination with her (or rather, her circumstances).  Kincaid is arguing that we, as a culture, are doing more or less exactly that with the entire issue of child molestation: exaggerating it as a kind of a blind for our purient fascination with child sexuality.  Basically, the more vigorously we indict the molesters, the more we acquit ourselves.

Kincaid is a damned good writer.  He hits a good balance between anecdote, theory, literature, and culture.  But the thing is ... he's wrong.  Kincaid is attempting to demonstrate the overblown nature of our fears via a combination of techniques (from dissecting broad statistics as inaccurate, and then replacing them with narrow ones with no evidence that the latter are more reliable than the former, to unsubtly suggesting that the enactment of Megan's Law be applied with the same scrupulous attention to detail once used to hunt Nazi war criminals because obviously, hahaha, molesters are not war criminals and thus our efforts are overblown).  If he'd stuck to the cultural presentation as a distraction from real and valid concerns, I'd be cheering.  But instead, he's arguing that we're exaggerating the threat to begin with, and that is ... unconvincing to me, given that the anecdotal evidence that I'm aware of tends to corroborate the generally accepted stats ... and I'm not doing any studies, here.  I'm just listening when people talk about their experiences.

That said, I'm sure it will be useful for my paper (even if I do feel a little dirty reading it, and even if I am wondering if its purchase has planted me on any watch lists), but exploring a long disquisition on our culture of fear didn't do a damned thing to make me feel safer about finding the garden gate swinging adrift in the wind when I stepped out for a smoke. 

Have I mentioned that I miss my Mace?

(no subject)

So maybe staying up late and reading books about abuse isn't my best bet for a healthy and happy lifestyle.

I'm currently reading Jame's R. Kincaid's Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molestation for the revision of the Alice paper that I presented at ICFA.  The book was recommended to me by a number of people, and it really does dovetail nicely with the argument I'm making: basically, I'm arguing that as a culture, we've aged Alice in order to excuse our fascination with her (or rather, her circumstances).  Kincaid is arguing that we, as a culture, are doing more or less exactly that with the entire issue of child molestation: exaggerating it as a kind of a blind for our purient fascination with child sexuality.  Basically, the more vigorously we indict the molesters, the more we acquit ourselves.

Kincaid is a damned good writer.  He hits a good balance between anecdote, theory, literature, and culture.  But the thing is ... he's wrong.  Kincaid is attempting to demonstrate the overblown nature of our fears via a combination of techniques (from dissecting broad statistics as inaccurate, and then replacing them with narrow ones with no evidence that the latter are more reliable than the former, to unsubtly suggesting that the enactment of Megan's Law be applied with the same scrupulous attention to detail once used to hunt Nazi war criminals because obviously, hahaha, molesters are not war criminals and thus our efforts are overblown).  If he'd stuck to the cultural presentation as a distraction from real and valid concerns, I'd be cheering.  But instead, he's arguing that we're exaggerating the threat to begin with, and that is ... unconvincing to me, given that the anecdotal evidence that I'm aware of tends to corroborate the generally accepted stats ... and I'm not doing any studies, here.  I'm just listening when people talk about their experiences.

That said, I'm sure it will be useful for my paper (even if I do feel a little dirty reading it, and even if I am wondering if its purchase has planted me on any watch lists), but exploring a long disquisition on our culture of fear didn't do a damned thing to make me feel safer about finding the garden gate swinging adrift in the wind when I stepped out for a smoke. 

Have I mentioned that I miss my Mace?

(no subject)

I remain irritated by Kincaid, but it's a useful kind of an irritation:while I may have scattered the margins with commentary like "ARE YOU KIDDING ME!?!?!" (in response to a paragraph in which he addresses the murder of Polly Klaas, only to end with the thought that, "even worse," it resulted in the heightening of attention for 3-strikes legislation), I think his fundamental question of why we as a society apply a frighteningly prurient interest to crimes against children, focusing primarily upon the crimes with a sexual component, is an interesting one.  I think he's dismissive, but I'm reading from the perspective of someone who's known a lot of survivors: I get the feeling that, like Kate Roiphe, Kincaid views the situation from an abstract perspective; it gives him the distance to ask interesting questions, but that same distance skews his answers.

Well, next up is Annoying the Victorians: certainly, I'll be approaching it from a position of empathy.

(no subject)

I remain irritated by Kincaid, but it's a useful kind of an irritation:while I may have scattered the margins with commentary like "ARE YOU KIDDING ME!?!?!" (in response to a paragraph in which he addresses the murder of Polly Klaas, only to end with the thought that, "even worse," it resulted in the heightening of attention for 3-strikes legislation), I think his fundamental question of why we as a society apply a frighteningly prurient interest to crimes against children, focusing primarily upon the crimes with a sexual component, is an interesting one.  I think he's dismissive, but I'm reading from the perspective of someone who's known a lot of survivors: I get the feeling that, like Kate Roiphe, Kincaid views the situation from an abstract perspective; it gives him the distance to ask interesting questions, but that same distance skews his answers.

Well, next up is Annoying the Victorians: certainly, I'll be approaching it from a position of empathy.