Good Sex Illustrated (18 page)

In our country, this normalizing and family-centricizing economic role also exists, but much more secretly. Boys who have“uncles” so that they can one day be fathers are more numerous than you think.

It’s clear that pederasties that have made a pact with the Order are as varied as possible; and as long as a pederast has power, money and knows how to respect middle class values and manipulate with them, he’ll do quite well.

There are still, as I’ve mentioned, the poor, the dissident, the cruisers—and the young, because you can be a “pedophile” at twelve, sixteen or twenty as well as you can be one at sixty. They don’t have the means, the need, the desire to collude. There will be simple communication with the child through desire, reciprocal desire. Does this exist? Yes, and educators know it. Because such pederasty lacks the terrifying face of parental power, in a black coat or a pair of drawers made of human skin; it’s not a trick, a form of abuse, and it preserves only the initial accord from the patterns of the sexual market; it lives, only and directly, from what the parents condemn, from what a lot of children deny themselves, from what self-righteous pederasts coat with social bonuses, the conjugal and family-centrism: pleasure. It exists at the meeting point of two rebellions, two desires usually deflected by the family order that is formed by the couples: desire of the child for the adult and desire of the adult for the child. Very “temporary” couples: sexualities of expenditure have no tomorrow—tomorrow, in this society, is always the beginning of the order, the opening of a market, a deal for pleasure that becomes a contract of exploitation.

You can’t warn children against that “danger.” We know that they’re involved in it by their own choice and if, outside, what resembles dad frightens them, what doesn’t resemble him seduces them too often. We don’t dare show, photograph a “danger” that doesn’t have a father’s face: no child would be able to find itthreatening. So we use the image of a dreadful father to stigmatize his opposite; and to dissuade a child from heeding a desire, we need do nothing more than put him on guard against humanity in general.

Don’t accept candy, presents, don’t speak to anyone, don’t hang around, don’t listen, don’t look, don’t get into a man’s car, it’s dangerous: when you’re outside, everyone wants to kill you, O.K.? Kill you.

Certainly it’s reasonable for parents to caution their children about not getting into cars; but I think that they’re mistaken about the reason. They’re afraid that the child will fall into the hands of a “maniac,” who’ll touch him, show himself and God knows what else. The risk is low, and incidents are slight. The real danger about the invitation to get into the car is an accident on the road. There’s something criminal about transporting a child in an automobile; you immediately expose him to wounds, mutilation, permanent disability and death. France’s millions of alcoholics aren’t the ones who will argue about that. But such industrial cruelty is legal, whereas the sexual pseudo-misdeeds are condemned. I’m not trying to justify these “misdeeds,” which are absolutely repugnant as abuses of power—and only to the extent that they are, this goes without saying. But on the one hand, it should be pointed out that such abuses exactly match the logic of all relations organized by our society between adults and children, adults and adults, children and children, men and women, etc.; and it certainly would be surprising if people abstained from the only small disgrace that is displeasing to the Order. On the other hand, it surprises me that parents protect their brat from this small form of abuse only to inflict a worse one on him. What they’re really trying to protect isn’t the child, but their own exclusive right to do whatever they want with him.

In the end, cars and the families who shut themselves up in them are products of the same society of exploitation; the feet that the latterkill themselves with the help of the former thus seems inevitable, if not heartening. Or rather, such “auto-destruction” would be an advantage if it could be used against the social order; but it’s still not relentless enough, and the number of families torn to pieces, children reduced to a pulp and automobiles turned into accordions remains too low to impress a public that cheerfully consumes as many horrible news items as they do smarmy novels. To the point that those who survive an accident are in a hurry to buy another car and, after a delay, shut up a new wife and children in it; like those lizards whose tail grows back if it’s broken off, in order to be men they tirelessly reproduce these superfluous, fragile, more or less uncooperative accessories that the market of sex and sheet metal offers to their greed.

Enough with the jokes. Each year in West Germany, there are 9,000 children murdered by their own parents.
Equivalent statistics have been gathered in other European countries
or the United States,
and could be adjusted for France.
 {
12
} These are not, may I point out, accidents on the road, but deaths following physical abuse rained down upon their precious blond heads by dads and moms.

Death in this case is only an exception, a regrettable incident, coming from sudden bad luck during or following an everyday carefree pleasure that is usually without consequence: persecuting children. A practice whose frequency can’t be calculated—in so much as that
for a long time doctors have shown the greatest reticence in admitting the existence of abuse committed by the parents themselves
. {
13
} That’s the main reason why we still don’t have complete information about parental sadism in France. Medicine only began to describe the “battered-child syndrome,” to keep patient chans showing abuse,or, rather, traces of it, in 1962; first in the United States, of course, and today in our country. I wonder how the doctors of the past interpreted those “bruises, hematomas, cuts, burns, multiple wounds” found on young children—an excess of masturbation, no doubt.

The enormous number of deaths, and the immensity of the universe of family-torture implicated by them was mentioned at U.N.E.S.C.O. in July 1973, during the first meeting of the association known as Filium, which brought together pediatricians, sociologists, criminologists and other notables from a variety of nations and was assigned the task of
studying all forms of crimes or offenses committed against children, from physical punishment to extermination by war—abandonment included.
 {
14
}

Thus, parents head the list of criminals, as they should; note, incidentally, that the men-in-the-park don’t make the list at all. An unfortunate oversight but, I suppose, temporary.

It is clear, nevertheless, that our notables are sensitive only to traditional genocide. Forms of violence that don’t kill attract them as well: “burns from cigarettes, pokers or irons,” for example, or “bleeding in the cranium.” And they are even interested in the most minute of problems: “clinical indications of malnutrition, emotional deprivation, psychological distress.” Aren’t poorly mothered little fly-openers classed among those victims? Not a word about it; another peculiar oversight.

As for calling “criminal” the abandonment of kids, who are taken in by institutions, orphanages, etc., which supposedly “contribute in their own way to the destruction of our children” (Professor Rascowsky), this is coming from the scoffers. Finally, to think that a custom as universally appreciated as war—our mostbeautiful and costliest proof of civilization, scientific genius and industrial prosperity—is a way for adults of “sending the youngest to be killed on battlefields” really borders on the revolutionary, pacifism and other infantile diseases that psychiatry knows perfectly well how to take care of.

Of course, the members of the Filium association have virtuous intentions; they are careful not to implicate the family or to commit to any political reflection regarding these problems; they only denounce the shortcomings of the order in the name of the order itself, and here we are dealing with a new wave of the very old philanthropic bourgeoisie. Condemning “filicide,” they simply mean: todays parents do a bad job at consuming their children. Families must learn to hull their childrens brains without shattering the shell, and to impose the order without prematurely killing the producers that it must enslave.

Who are these inept parents? I will draw from a few sources about them from an author who can hardly be suspected of being left wing, Doctor Friedrich Hacker. {
15
} It will confirm the obvious: the persecution of children is carried out in the name of the Order and it is oedipal. It represents the last word in family life, its no fantasy.

Because children were whining, they have been doused with boiling water, put on a hot stove, been strangled until they die, thrashed until blood flows and their skin is in shreds… Neighbors have heard the sobs, the cries of rage, the heavy blows, the groans followed by silence.
But you don’t get mixed up in other people’s personal business, and these “neighbors” don’t intervene,
they approve of and allow the physical abuse
, and
close their ears to the outrage:
it’s
impossible,
these tortures, the torturers
must be aware of what they’re doing and why.
Doctor Hacker states that 20% of cases of
seriously mistreated children
registered in Los Angeles
resulted in the death of the victim
; he doesn’t specify the level of abuse that is considered by a hospital to classify a child as belonging to the statistical category of “seriously mistreated.” But a death rate of 20% leaves us to believe that such bad treatment must be fairly extreme; the competition for a place in the statistics is rough.

Doctor Hacker admits that, given the material, the figures
have little meaning: actual proportion of battered children in cities is 10 to 15 times greater than that specified by the statistics. Underestimation of the phenomenon in rural areas could amount to 100 to 200. No other criminal statistic entails such a margin of error.

Then follows a study done in Los Angeles. Parents who tortured were examined (for a very rare case in which the abuse was reported and the kid taken to the hospital) and found to be
sane
; less than 1% present
any signs of insanity,
and only
1.5% can be classified as sadists, even in the general sense of the word
(the more generalized statistics from Filium confirm 3% to be “mentally ill”). Sixty percent enjoy an income that is higher than average, 40% have an income that is lower.
There is no statistically valid relationship
between this crime and
level of culture, profession, race, religion or the sex
of the parents. Main perpetrator of the persecution, the father,
almostalways under the direction of the mother,
women are less likely to pitch in, but
they are worse.

The environment of the family is
stable,
the number of divorces
does not exceed the average.
The average age of the persecutors is between 20 and 30, that of victims always less than 4 (from 1 to 4 years old: 75%).

For 90% of the parents, the
determining cause of the abuse
was
the tears and incessant screams of the child.
Anger or parental exasperation? No:
a methodical system of cold or cool violence, unaccompanied by emotive hostility, simply practical and reality-based.
It’s a matter of maintaining order every day, relentlessly. During family holidays, when nothing must disturb the ritual,
the result of a forced harmony,
there is more beating:
in many pediatric hospitals and clinics there is a noticeable influx of battered children around Christmas. The emotional and solemn atmosphere proves to be particularly intolerant
of any irregularity in the behavior of children. The Christmas tree and the clean carpet are the latest gods to which kids are sacrificed: the child is beaten, killed because
he’s crying, dirtying the lovingly cleaned apartment, and shows neither consideration nor respect nor deference.
Most of the time, the persecuted child was
wanted,
but once born, he has
disappointed,
as a source of dirtiness, disorder and noise.

After their crime, the parents
express some regret
but
remain convinced of the necessity of instilling discipline in all young people from very early on.
Almost always, these parents belong to
small family units that cultivate a certain suspicion toward others and quite a few pretensions.
They are
fixated on themselves and their children,
they have
few friends or interests outside of work and television.
They are
unsociable
and
distrust everything that is not familiar.
They consider
order and cleanliness to be supreme values
; their household is
a stronghold, nothing has the right to undermine it.

I barely dare to say that these
asocial
American parents,
who are abnormal in the way they exaggerate what’s normal and usual to absurdity
—but who, as Doctor Hacker says,
suffer very little from personality disorders:
they
make their children suffer from them
—oddly resemble ordinary French parents. And the familial closed doors of the persecutors on the other side of the Atlantic are in many ways equivalent to those of our peaceful and very private French households.

The killers and those who don’t kill are normal from top to bottom: there’s nothing special about them, except for the fact that they take order to the letter. Since the criteria for “mental health” is “responsibility”—orthodoxy in behavior, speech, work and morals—psychiatry is incapable of assigning “pathology” to criminality that would be the sufficient and necessary symptom of “disease” if it occurred out of this framework (profession-property-family). Psychiatry has to remain silent at the point where the order that it protects commences; and although it’s been tearing “maladjusted” kids submitted to it to shreds for years, it can only offer a certificate of normalcy to adults who are so well adjusted that they murder in order to adjust others.