There comes a time when every tyrant overplays his hand. He gets cocky. What began as a hidden agenda becomes explicit. His carefully masked contempt for his followers erupts into an inflammatory public display of loathing. After years of chafing under the constriction of his own propaganda machine, he exults in casting off the last concessions to human decency. The grandiosity which began as an undeveloped defense against abysmally low self-esteem has been buttressed, rampart by rampart, by the arrogance and entitlement of patriarchal structures, until it has become the armature of a personality, the substitute for a soul.

This moment does not arrive unheralded. There are warnings along the way—shocking encroachments, unguarded moments, slips, near-misses. These are covered up, excused. There are phony apologies, scapegoats, favors called in, threats. Each time that there is a close call where the followers have the opportunity to glimpse the man behind the curtain, but where they fail to interpret correctly what they are seeing and fail to respond appropriately, the tyrant grows more confident, his ego more distended.

Sometimes, the peak of hubris is preceded by a near brush with self-awareness, a close call with accountability... a notable move in the right direction... and then, like a rubber band stretched taut, the backlash into grandiosity: the moment—the spectacle—of full-blown, unmistakable self-revelation. No more disguises, no more concessions. A display of raw power and virulent hatred.

I just finished reading an article in The New York Times about a film by the late artist Larry Rivers. The film had been part of an archive of his work belonging to the Larry Rivers Foundation, which was just sold to New York University.

The problem is that the film is child pornography. Well, no. Actually, the problem is that New York University seems unable to recognize that it’s child pornography, because it was made by a famous man using his two daughters as subjects. The problem is that New York University is denying the daughters’ request that the film be destroyed. NYU has agreed to restrict access to the film for the lifetime of the women, but that’s it… because, after all, this is the work of a great man.

Wait a minute… Isn’t it illegal to buy child pornography? To own it? This is a film where the father’s voice is heard telling his reluctant daughters to take off their clothes. The camera zooms in on the breasts or the genitalia, while the father asks prurient questions about their boyfriends and comments on the changes in their bodies. The filming began when one of the girls was 11 and covered a period of five years or more. The girls, visibly self-conscious, are naked or topless. One of them barely speaks. What part of “child pornography” doesn’t NYU understand?

But there’s another way to look at this. Who owns the work?

I’m going to make a radical proposition here: I’m going to propose that childhood be recognized as a sovereign state, and that children be treated as the indigenous populations of a world colonized by adults.

Most folks don’t want to think of children that way, because most of us don’t want to consider how many children are living as captives, how socializing the child is really about colonizing her. And it’s easy for us not to think about them this way, because they do not have a voice, a movement, a lobby, a dime—and they never will.  Children do not have a language specific to their experience with which to frame a paradigm of their sovereignty. And that lack of language is one of the most priceless aspects of their culture. It is a culture of astounding plasticity, adaptability. It is a culture of magic, of naiveté, of gullibility, of heartbreaking innocence and spontaneity. 

“Cultural restitution” is a term that refers to returning stolen works of art and artifacts and bones of indigenous cultures. When the Nazis raided the museums of Europe to enhance their own prestige, they were operating according to the laws of their own corrupt regime. These seizures are not recognized as legitimate by a world restored to sanity, and, after a slow start, the stolen works of art are being identified and returned. It is immaterial that they may have been sold to third and fourth parties unaware of their original status as Nazi contraband. The rights of the victims have been affirmed.

“Cultural restitution” also refers to art and artifacts taken from indigenous cultures to be housed in museums or historical collections. Skeletons and burial artifacts are being returned to the tribes from whom they were taken by archeologists. There is an acknowledgement that a sovereign people have a right to their history and their culture, and that it is a violation of the sovereignty for another people, even a conquering one, to appropriate the artifacts of that history or culture.

This obscene film by Larry Rivers is an artifact of the corpse of his daughters’ raided and stolen childhood. It was never his to bequeath, and it had no place in the archive passed on to the Larry Rivers Foundation, and New York University has no right to purchase it. It belongs to the daughters. It is the documentation of their violation. It is the reliquary of their lost innocence.  

Children have a right to their lives, to their experience. And when a colonizing, predatory adult invades this world, exploiting their vulnerability and raiding their innocence in the name of “art,” children should have the right of an indigenous people to claim the artifact that bears witness to their invasion and colonization.

Was it collaborative? Was this a joint cultural effort between the sovereign state of childhood and the empire of adulthood? This is what one of the daughters, Emma Tamburlini, has to say about her experience: She tells us that it caused her to become anorexic at sixteen, that she has spent years in therapy trying to deal with her father’s behavior. She says that, if she objected to taking off her clothes and being filmed, her father would say she was “uptight,” a “bad daughter.” When she tried to confront him as a teenager, he told her that her intellectual development had been arrested. Seems he was a verbal abuser, as well…

Ms. Tamburlini sums up: “It wrecked a lot of my life, actually.” That sounds about right, actually.

The other sister, the one who is so quiet in the film, declined to comment.

It’s very clear that the daughters’ participation was not voluntary. This was not a situation between equals. It was between a child and an adult—a dependent and her caregiver. Children in a situation like Rivers’ daughters have no more power to resist than the prisoners at Abu Ghraib, who were ordered to strip and participate in sexually humiliating scenarios.

If there is ever a more clear-cut issue of ownership in this world, it is the right of child to the privacy and integrity of her body. What could be more intimately one’s property than one’s organs, one’s skin? What can be more clear than the dependence of a child? There is no ambiguity here. There is no debate about “what is art.” The film is pedophilic and pornographic, a record of incestuous abuse.

This is not a scientific film documenting the developmental stages of mammary glands. This is not an erotic film, celebrating the sensual beauty of adult women. This is a film about humiliation. The subject of the film is the sexual subordination of two girls and their mother to the prurient and pedophilic obsession of a predatory father.

And what about this mother? She participated in the film, certainly enabling the abuse of her daughters. On the other hand, in 1981, she managed to prevent her perpetrator of a husband from showing the film at an exhibition. According to her, “What Larry said was that it would belong to [the girls], as a record that when they got older they could look back at… It wasn’t a huge thing. It’s become huge, because they can’t get back what was given to them.”

Begging to differ, it was a huge thing. Although it's understandable why a daughter in a situation like this might feel safer sharing her feelings with a reporter from a national newspaper.

Here is my fantasy: The daughters will sue. Hundreds of child psychologists and pediatricians, as well as experts in international law will show up for the trial to give testimony. A new precedent will be set. The rights of children will be recognized as those of a sovereign nation, an indigenous people. Damages will be awarded, and, under laws pertaining to cultural restitution, the film will be returned to the two women whose childhood was invaded and violated.

And in my fantasy, Emma Tamburlini will testify, using the same words cited in the Times article. She will say: “I don’t want the film out there in the world.” And then she will repeat a statement she made, a statement straight from the heart of her childhood nightmare, spoken in the elusive and elliptical language of children. And maybe there will be an official interpreter who can translate it into the pedestrian regionalism of adulthood, in words that even a librarian at NYU can understand.

The daughter’s statement is this: “It just makes it worse.”

And, of course, every child understands.

This is the fourth and final part of my series on incest denial, which has been inspired by reading Lynn Sacco’s long-overdue book Unspeakable: Father-Daughter Incest in American History.

Quick recap of the timeline:

• Colonial era: Surprising candor about incest as evidenced by number of reports in the paper, including cases involving middle-class and socially prominent men; civic outrage in favor of victims; packed courtrooms; death sentences and hard labor.

• After 1860’s: Steep decline in coverage, scapegoating of immigrant populations and African Americans. Denial of prevalence, disbelief of survivors, medical community discourages using presence of gonorrhea in victims as evidence, insisting that the vaginitis must be non-venereal.
  

• After discovery of gonococcus bacterium: Doctors insist that girls can contract gonorrhea from toilet seats. Focus shifts to mothers and their inattention to hygiene. Infected girls are socially ostracized as carriers of potential epidemics.
  

• 1940’s and 1950’s: Theories of Freud enter the popular culture. Reports of incest by girls are interpreted as fantasies based on their desires to have sex with their fathers. Kinsey insists that the damage from child sexual abuse comes from puritanical ideas in the culture, not from the rape itself.

• 1980’s: All hell breaks lose. The Women’s Liberation Movement empowers women to tell our stories, to trust each other and ourselves. Rape and incest come out of the closet. Epidemic of sexual abuse exposed. Huge boom in academic studies, self-help books, films, novels, memoirs dealing with incest. Feminists theorize that incest is a gender issue and a political issue. Father-daughter incest is framed as “the paradigm of patriarchy.”

So… that was twenty years ago, right? The next bullet point should say: Incest epidemic over. Massive prosecutions and public awareness campaigns. Culture arrives at “zero tolerance” attitude.

Nope. That didn’t happen. There was a backlash. Amazingly enough it was fueled by pedophiles and perpetrators, and the culture sided with them.

In 1993, the New York Times Book Review ran a front page article by a woman about the “cult of victimhood” fostered by the women’s movement. She made reference to the “incest survivor machine.”  During the 1990’s, feminism became the “f” word, as postmodernism took over the academy, declaring that “woman” was a social construct and that anyone relating it to anatomy or biology was something called an “essentialist.” “Essentialism” was framed as a mystical term, when, in fact, there has never been a more more tail-swallowing, self-referentially obfuscating philosophy than postmodernism. Interestingly enough, and NOT coincidentally at all, two of the founders of postmodernism, Foucault and Derrida, had taken public, pro-pedophilia stances for abolishing age of consent altogether in France.  

Women began to believe that it was empowering to ignore gendered oppression. Something called the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF) was established. It was founded in 1992 by Pamela and Peter Freyd, shortly after their daughter Jennifer privately confronted them with her memory of father-daughter incest. At least one member of their board had connections with pedophilic organizations. The scientific community has never endorsed or validated this so-called syndrome, and memory repression is a documented response to trauma, especially in childhood. Peter Freyd, interestingly, was an admitted alcoholic with a history of multiple hospitalizations and psychiatric care.

This foundation, with its pseudo-scientific theories, launched a huge media campaign. Carefully, they framed incest accusations as attacks on the families, protecting the fact that the perpetrators were overwhelmingly fathers. Not stopping there, they accused therapists of encouraging the revenge fantasies of their clients, or even suggesting and implanting memories. They began to sue. The fact that so many incest survivors were seeking help from therapists began to be used against them, “proof” that False Memory Syndrome was taking place.

They sued the authors of Courage to Heal, a book that has saved lives and given hope to thousands. They did not win the suit, but they were successful in getting legislation passed to limit insurance benefits for psychotherapy. They demanded that, in order to prove the validity of an incest memory, the survivor would need to remember every detail with complete accuracy. Not surprisingly, no survivor could meet their standards.

How does Sacco sum up her studies on father-daughter incest in American history? With this statement: “… shoring up the social power of certain men has, at every turn, been more important than protecting the physical and emotional integrity of girls, who have paid dearly to keep the fabric of American society, its ideologies and social hierarchies, intact.”

But… I want to add a postscript. Postmodernism is waning. The priesthood scandals (where boys constituted the majority of victims, by the way) have raised international outrage about the issue of child sexual abuse. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have brought the issue of PTSD to the forefront of veteran care, and with it, a validation of the impact of trauma. Military Sexual Trauma has been identified and been the subject of a Congressional investigation. (and my blog!) Sadly, little has changed, but it has been validated. The global economic and environmental crises are waking people up to the consequences of our rapacious attitudes of entitlement. Young women, saddled with staggering student loans and increasing pornographifying of the culture, are beginning to realize that ignoring their oppression is not empowering, but just foolish.

I encourage all of us to write the post-backlash chapter. To tell the truth. To confront perpetrators. To stop having Thanksgiving dinner, or Hanukkah, or Christmas, or Kwanzaa across the table from our rapists. To stop letting the enablers off the hook.  Get the support to name it, confront it, demand accountability, and respond appropriately when that accountability is not forthcoming. Find good therapists, therapists who can identify Complex PTSD and who know how to treat it. Read Judith Herman, take responsibility for your health care. Arm yourself with knowledge, including knowledge of incest history, books like Unspeakable.

Never, ever let anyone or any voice in your head tell you that incest is not that big a deal, not that important in light of the world’s “real problems,” not significant in your own history. Never abandon your truth. Never abandon yourself. And, in the words of survivor Marilyn Van Derbur:

“We must say to every member of our society: If you violate your children, they may not speak today, but as we gather our strength and stand beside them, they will, one day, speak your name. They will speak every single name.”


Click here to read "Incest Denial Part 1"
Click here to read "Incest Denial Part 2"
Click here to read "Incest Denial Part 3"