when second wave feminists brought the widespread nature of incest and child sex abuse to the light, they located its causes very accurately in the patriarchal family, the social and economic domination of men over women, the dependence and thus vulnerability of children. these critiques which threaten the very foundations of the patriarchal order were quickly swept under the figure of “the pedophile.” it was no longer a deep-seated structural issue inevitable in a society ordered in specific oppressive ways, but a matter of individual pathology. the child molester isn’t your dad or your nice neighbor or your priest or your little league coach, it’s a pedophile: some barely human monster. and if the child molester is your dad, or your nice neighbor, or your priest, or your little league coach, and they can be recognized as such, well, they are transformed as if by magic from those integral parts of the human community into the pedophile as demonic outcast. the feminist systematic critique is neutralized. this is why i hate to see pedophile used to refer to almost anything but someone’s self-expressed sexual fixation on prepubescent children. it is not semantic quibbling or minimizing abuse, but that i think the use of the term pedophile as the ubiquitous framework for understanding csa is the minimization of the depth of the problem.
