According to sociologist Peter Berger, his discipline is “an intrinsically debunking discipline that should be congenial to nihilists, cynics, and other fit subjects for police surveillance,” and the popular suspicion of sociology is grounded in “a sound instinct for survival.” That quotation is found in historian Page Smith’s fine book, Killing the Spirit (1990). An example supporting Berger’s warning is a recent paper published in the American Sociological Association’s journal Sex and Sexualities, titled “Childhood Sexualities: On Pleasure and Meaning from the Margins.”
Not surprisingly the paper’s primary author, Deevia Bhana, holds the South African Chair in Gender and Childhood Sexuality at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. The relatively short article (c. 3,000 words) is written in the opaque intellectual jargon that has dominated academic discourse for the last half-century. Here’s a typical paragraph:
Re-centering pleasure at the margins therefore confronts both colonial and heteropatriarchal logics, insisting that children’s own accounts of what feels good, exciting, or frightening are legitimate sources of knowledge. Thus, letting children “do” sexual pleasure in their own way is vital for their sense of their own agency. Yet, only by tracing the circuits in which race, class, gender, and age secure or foreclose pleasure can we theorize children’s sexual worlds.
After wading through Bhana’s “scholarly” verbiage, the Manhattan Institute’s Dr. Colin Wright observed that the peer-reviewed paper views “childhood innocence” as a “colonial fiction” and that it urges us to see children as sexual beings. Wright concludes, “It is hard to read this [paper] as anything other than laying the intellectual groundwork for dismantling age-of-consent protections.” Beyond Bhana’s tributes to age, race, class, sex, and other power-based distinctions, it’s clear she minimizes the danger of sexualizing children and embraces “diverse” expressions of childhood pleasure.
Unfortunately, the sexualization of children has been going on in plain sight prior to the abstruse intellectualizing that puts a sociological seal of approval on that corruption. Bhana seeks only to add “intersectional” categories to the “educational” process of confusing youngsters about who they are by destroying “colonial” and “heteronormative” notions about childhood sexuality. For her, drag queen story hour would merely be part one of an indoctrination program touting victimhood and pre-teen sexual “agency” — “agency” being a code-word for making your own rules and doing your own thing.
The latter task is something at which Hollywood and the film community have excelled for some time, the case of Roman Polanski being Exhibit A. Polanski pleaded guilty to having intercourse with a 13-year-old girl in 1977 but still received a slew of honors subsequently, including an Academy Award for Best Director in 2003. Doubtless the overtly sexual content of music and music videos beginning in the MTV era moved the sexual needle from just teenagers toward the 9–12 “tweener” category. More recently, the “trans” movement with its companion “drag queen story hour” has exposed even younger kids to sexual expressions formerly confined to adults at Bourbon Street nightclubs.
Not wishing to be branded as “judgmental” or “conservative,” ABC’s and Disney’s Good Morning America in 2018 featured an 11-year-old “drag kid” (stage name: “Desmond is Amazing”), for whom host Michael Strahan and the studio audience cheered enthusiastically during his sexually suggestive performance. Subsequently, as Matt Walsh notes, “Desmond” graduated to dancing at gay nightclubs, where patrons threw money at him. Walsh also highlights several other “drag kid” and “drag queen” atrocities that a few decades past would have warranted arrests for indecent exposure and parental child abuse. Just recently, Elon Musk called on customers to cancel their Netflix subscriptions based on transgender themes in, among other offerings, the company’s animated show Dead End: Paranormal Park.
On the legislative front, California, as usual, leads the nation by passing a law signed by Governor Newsom in 2020 that gives judges discretion about listing someone as a sex offender for having “voluntary” oral or anal sodomy with a minor. The bill was promoted as bringing fairness to LGBT defendants. In addition, a bill passed in 2022 (SB 107) made California a sanctuary state for minors seeking “sex change” drugs and surgeries proscribed in other states. In a similar vein, in 2024, California legally prohibited schools from requiring parental notification when students decide at school to be called members of the opposite sex.
Elsewhere in the world, the United Kingdom’s government became brazenly deferential toward non-Western cultural standards vis-à-vis sex with and assaults against minors. Recent convictions of gang members engaged in the grooming and rape of girls as young as ten may signal, however, that Britons are finally ready to return to more traditional or “colonial” (cf. Bhana) anti-rape mores.
Given the academic and media-fueled frenzy in favor of deconstructing centuries of legal and cultural prohibitions against sexualizing minors (a deconstruction personified in the life and writing of its Bhana-cited intellectual avatar, Michel Foucault), one could view Jeffrey Epstein’s notorious crimes as just another degenerate byproduct of our era, perhaps slightly ahead of his time.
Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: “Who’s to Say?” is available on Kindle.
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