Rethinking Youth and Transactional Sex

Among the most important claims of Rachel Hope Cleves’s excellent book, Unspeakable, is that for significant periods of time, the pederasty practiced by her subject, Norman Douglas, and by many of his friends was not so unspeakable at all. Douglas actually spoke about it a lot. While we may now think of Douglas’s life as one “beyond sexual morality,” per the subtitle, he certainly would not have agreed. His own defense of that life, as well as his extensive correspondence with others about their shared interests in sex with young people, constitutes the bulk of the evidence in this compelling and disturbing history. The tricky thing, no doubt, about choosing a title for a book like this is that Cleves is arguing that societal understandings of pederasty have changed over time, meaning that one evaluative adjective — unspeakable — is only going to be true either for then, when he practiced it, or now, when we condemn it. The contrast between these two understandings of pederasty as acceptable or not acceptable constitutes one of the most fascinating interventions of the book. In order to flesh out that conflict with some detail, I want to focus on two related avenues that Cleves explores: the role of the children’s parents in brokering the sex; and the sometimes-transactional nature of the sex itself, whether formally or more casually, and what that might tell us about trauma or the lack thereof. One of the most telling insights into how Douglas and his friends understood their pederastic practices was that they were not clandestinely having sex with children unbeknownst to those children’s parents. Indeed, Douglas often paid those very parents for the privilege of so doing. In one instance, Douglas was advised by a friend, “‘You pay so much a year to the parents, quite a small sum, and they set her aside for you, and for you alone, till she has reached the proper age.’” Once you were done with her, “you could pass her on afterwards to some husband, or send her back to the family.” While the sum might have been small to Douglas and others of his ilk, it could well have made an incredible difference in the lives of an impoverished family. Alternatively, the girl herself might use the payment in order to secure a husband. Or a boy might use the capital to be able to afford marriage or the beginning of a business. In other instances, Cleves argues that parents saw Douglas’s willingness to take care of their sons as being a kind of mentorship that would help the sons in the future, at the same time that it saved the parents the cost of caring for them. He also educated some of these boys, setting them on their way toward class mobility. So not only did these parents understand their own children differently from how most parents today might do — not believing in the inherent trauma of childhood sexual abuse or experience — but that also factored into how they understood their own roles as parents, not as protectors, for instance, but instead as wanting to ensure future opportunities for those kids (in the form of connections and education) and in being perfectly comfortable profiting from the sexual labour of their children. No doubt this would strike many contemporary readers as rather mercenary, perhaps even comparable to the actions of Douglas and his cronies, especially given that the parents presumably loved their children and felt a sense of custodial duty toward them, or at least that they lived in a society that expected this …