Rating: 
Summary: Startling Thesis, Flawed Book
Review: Back in the 1950s, Leslie Fiedler stunned America with his thesis that the great American novels were homoerotic love stories: Huck and Jim in "Huckleberry Finn," Ishmael and Queequeg in "Moby Dick," etc. He seemed correct as well as sensational, and American writing since Fiedler's magnum opus "Love and Death in the America Novel" and his jarring essay "Come Back to the Raft again Huck Honey" has only buttressed his point.James Kinkaid has made an even bolder claim a half-century later, that pedophile fantasy can be found at the heart of our most revered movies like "The Good Ship Lollipop" or "Home Alone." "Our culture has enthusiastically sexualized the child while denying just as enthusiatically that it was doing any such thing," he writes, capsulizing his argument. I think this claim in intuitively true. A lot of films show kids in their underwear gratuitously and use the ambivalence of art to insinuate what taboo dictates cannot be directly stated. Macaulay Culkin in the "Home Alone" movies is a beautiful blonde with unnatural cherry-red lips like Harlowe or Monroe! But the conclusions Kinkaid draws from his observations aren't as forceful and eloquent as the debunking observations themselves. If he is right, what does this mean? His answer seems to be kind of vague. He suggests we rewrite the Gothic script and stop overrating innocence and panicking about the burgeoning sexuality of the young. His pervasive humor throughout the book suggests a kind a campy scholarship. I am all for humor, but I think Kinkaid needs to write another book about how our society can get out of the quandary of its sexual hypocrisy. It's a larger and more complex subject than he seems to think. Also, he chooses his pictures poorly, and I think they're essential to making his points about the eroticized child. I hope these misgivings don't steer you away from "Erotic Innocence" though. Its a totally fresh perspective, and how many books deliver that anymore? Read it as the opening slavo of what I'm predicting will be a long 21st century battle between the prigs and the libertarians.
Rating:
Summary: Startling Thesis, Flawed Book
Review: Back in the 1950s, Leslie Fiedler stunned America with his thesis that the great American novels were homoerotic love stories: Huck and Jim in "Huckleberry Finn," Ishmael and Queequeg in "Moby Dick," etc. He seemed correct as well as sensational, and American writing since Fiedler's magnum opus "Love and Death in the America Novel" and his jarring essay "Come Back to the Raft again Huck Honey" has only buttressed his point. James Kinkaid has made an even bolder claim a half-century later, that pedophile fantasy can be found at the heart of our most revered movies like "The Good Ship Lollipop" or "Home Alone." "Our culture has enthusiastically sexualized the child while denying just as enthusiatically that it was doing any such thing," he writes, capsulizing his argument. I think this claim in intuitively true. A lot of films show kids in their underwear gratuitously and use the ambivalence of art to insinuate what taboo dictates cannot be directly stated. Macaulay Culkin in the "Home Alone" movies is a beautiful blonde with unnatural cherry-red lips like Harlowe or Monroe! But the conclusions Kinkaid draws from his observations aren't as forceful and eloquent as the debunking observations themselves. If he is right, what does this mean? His answer seems to be kind of vague. He suggests we rewrite the Gothic script and stop overrating innocence and panicking about the burgeoning sexuality of the young. His pervasive humor throughout the book suggests a kind a campy scholarship. I am all for humor, but I think Kinkaid needs to write another book about how our society can get out of the quandary of its sexual hypocrisy. It's a larger and more complex subject than he seems to think. Also, he chooses his pictures poorly, and I think they're essential to making his points about the eroticized child. I hope these misgivings don't steer you away from "Erotic Innocence" though. Its a totally fresh perspective, and how many books deliver that anymore? Read it as the opening slavo of what I'm predicting will be a long 21st century battle between the prigs and the libertarians.
Rating: 
Summary: Think...
Review: I haven't read this book but I had a class with Kincaid. A few remarks: The people whose reviews said that he did not have good evidence did not provide anything better to argue their side. So, without what they consider sufficient evidence for either argument (child abuse is or isn't a social construction), they side with the status quo. In other words, they never even thought about it. Kincaid always told us that he didn't pretend to have unearthed any absolute truth, he just thought it was valid to see things in ways that make you uncomfortable. I hate to sound like a fanatic, but honestly, I've never thought of the world in the same way since having his class. Also, his writing is always well-crafted and frequently hilarious (check out Annoying the Victorians).
Rating:
Summary: wrong book reviewed and rather rushed too!!
Review: I meant too review "Harmful to minors" which I read not this one which I didn't read (in its entirety)-- but I'm against the fear mongers that wish to frighten and repress young people (esp teens) -- read Freud--children are already sexual--they can be repressed not "sexualized
Rating: 
Summary: Me thinks the author projecteth too much
Review: I suspect this work is a long-winded attempt to normalize the author's own proclivities.
Rating:
Summary: The author is projecting his desires
Review: I'd like to start of by saying that I found a link to this book from a pedophile website. First the author denies that pedophiles actively stalk children Go online-create a profile as a 12 year old girl and then go sit in a chartroom minding your own business. Within fifteen minutes you will be inundated with private messages from grown men wanting to talk sex with you and exchange phone numbers and/or set up meetings. The author believes that ALL adults are sexually attracted to children, and that every movie-star child was a sex symbol, and indeed, that ever photograph of a child is a sexual one! I chance that you couldn't ever capture a child on video or film in a way that the author would NOT find deliriously erotic. Pedophiles are notorious for taking every thing a kid does as a "Come Hither" If al little girl in a dress says "Look, I can do a cartwheel!" The pedophile thinks: she is deliberately flashing her panties and trying to seduce me If a little kid innocently sits on his lap, the pedophile thinks: He/She is sitting on my lap to deliberately rub his/her ass against my crotch and seduce me. Why is he dancing around the issue spouting "age is just a number" and "children are very sexual"?
Oh puh-leeese.
The problem with sex with kids isn't their age.
It's the abuse of power.
This is why bosses can't date the people they hire and fire, and why military officers can't date the enlisted.
An adult can always quit a job-but a child is never in a position to displease or disobey an adult.
... Certainly children explore physical curiosities with other children.
But under no circumstances should an adult sexualize a child.
Rating:
Summary: In one word, "Boring".
Review: In his introduction Mr Kincaid states that there are good writers and then there are writers that get good reviews. Sadly Mr Kincaid will never fit into either of those categories as he tends to go into overtext with his own opinion of the limited amount case studies he has supplied. His intent appears to be pointing the finger of sex crimes not at the offender but at the system that prevents child abuse, because child abuse was not there two hundred years ago it must be the system that was put in place at that time. He typifies his beliefs by stating that child abuse has only increased since the system was put in place. Could it not in fact be the increase in both population and development of modern technologies that have increased both the number of offenders and the numbers we know have offended. He is right about several things including certain bias by the police and press but fails to note that rather than being the norm this is usually the extreme. In particular he points out the fact that the press has a tendency to dwell on the erotic. What he leaves out is that they also dwell on war, murder, politics and bank robbery amoungst others, that after all is the nature of news. For those trying to learn something about the criminal or the people who fight them I recommend "The Evil That Men Do" by Stephen G. Michaud with Roy Hazelwood. And for those looking for a few erotic stories, don't expect any.
Rating:
Summary: This book attempts to resolve a terrible dilemma.
Review: Kincaid begins from the premise that our culture's stories are flexible, and reflect our underlying cosmologies. He demonstrates convincingly that myths about childhood innocence and concurrent vulnerability arose historically as we created a separate cultural identity for children. This stoked a quasi-erotic love of children as innocents, and a hatred of those who act out that eroticism. There is a widespread obsession with children, and an obsession with those who act on that societally generated eroticism. Those who are inclined to hate have fostered a bitter hatred of those who are trapped by the wrong kind of love of children. Dahmers and Gacys are rare and twisted individuals, but they are held up by these haters as representatives of all who break the rules for touching and loving children. Kincaid shows, though, that society dotes on cute, eroticized children, as long as appropriate hypocrisies are maintained. He suggests that the frenzied hatred of child-abusers is fed by this same hypocritical eroticism. Up to this point, Kincaid is bold and persuasive. Children themselves become damaged by the myth, being taught that be be desired or contacted erotically by an adult is to become the most damaged of society's victims, and even potential abusers themselves, and that any love expressed in these relationships, perhaps by the only adult who has shown them love, is absolutely thereby discounted. The truth is that "hard-core" sexual contact with children is a harmful and abusive practice, and only the most blind or self-serving can deny this. Kincaid does not attempt to deny this, although he questions its frequency. Kincaid challenges all of us to find ways to reconcile the awareness of this cold harm with our "warm" behaviors in the unmapped areas of love. The book fails however in developing effective and compelling alternative stories. The tortuous paradigm he describes throughout the book exists, besides serving a "pleasure-principle motive", as a societal adaptation to prevent a shift into the wholesale abuse of children. The current and hypocritical arrangement kills and imprisons some relativey innocent adults as a means of controlling and containing erotic impulsivity towards children, but much of life seems to work this way. We may need new stories if we are to act in a more wholesome and communally suportive fashion, but Dr. Kincaid does not succeed in outlining them. Thus the pain and hurt (and titillation) will go on. Maybe there are no better stories. Still, the gauntlet has been flung.
Rating:
Summary: Unscientific writing which doesn't prove the thesis.
Review: Mr. Kincaid presents the reader with an in-depth look at what lies behind the average person's idea of what a child is. Similarly, he shows how this (apparently flawed and dangerous) concept is commonly fit into what he calls a "story," which is a subjective, but shared, view of a certain type of situation. He concentrates on accounts dealing with sexual abuse. Whenever someone is accused of sexually abusing a child, Kincaid says, there is an almost universal compulsion to put people into roles of innocent victim (the child,) protector (the police, and others) and inhuman monster (the accused,) even if it does not fit the facts. Further, he says, this ideal of "child" is very commonplace in works of art, showing that adults have a strange compulsion to be entertained by a certain kind of child, in a certain kind of situation. Then, Kincaid comes to his emphatic conclusion: The reason children are treated and thought of in this way is because adults, all adults, are sexually attracted to children, and simultaneously feel that it is wrong and act to deny and hide it. The above explanation does not follow from the book's contents. The author presents no evidence (short of listing countless plots of novels and movies involving children, then insisting that they are erotic,) makes no attempt to validate or support his thesis with either psychological, empirical, or sociological data, and worst of all, acts as if this methodology is just hunky-dory. His irrational and similarly unsupported contention that all knowledge and accounts of past events are merely malleable, subjective "stories" is simply a sloppy way of covering up the fact that his entire explanation is arbitrary and unsupported by any logic or truth. I was certainly willing to consider his ideas, indeed, that is why I read the book at all. In fact, _Erotic Innocence_ is not without its worth. Buried underneath the rambling, egg-headed prose lie some interesting insights. For example, that many people do have a false and harmful idea of what children are or should be. That these same people obsessively and emotionally try to make a predetermined Gothic melodrama play out in every sexual abuse case involving children, even in defiance of facts. Those points, to varying degrees, are reasonably well argued. What is not, is his fantastic explanation of why this is so. The most ominous thing about this book, though, is that Kincaid purports to be one of but a few people who can cut through the hysteria with truth, when in fact he adds to it a hundredfold by saying that EVERYONE is a pedophile and that (nearly?) every work of art involving children eroticizes them. Furthermore, his solution is not for people to wake up from the "story" and see things as they are, but to instead construct new "stories," i.e. to delude themselves into believing something else. This, he has the gall to call "rational." "I believe most adults in our culture feel some measure of erotic attraction to children and the childlike; I do not know how it could be otherwise," he writes, in a statement which summarizes the book's logic. Sorry, Mr. Kincaid. I need a lot more than your testimony of faith to believe such a fantastic story.
Rating:
Summary: Oh no, he's exactly right!!!
Review: Want your eyes opened? Read this book. I must warn you though, after flipping through channels a few hours following the introduction of this book, you may want to get rid of your television. Kincaid really ticked me off initially in his intro, but by the end of it I was mesmerized clear through to the end of the book. The thought that we have and still do sexualize children in our country (and world) really sucks at first, but then you realize its true and it almost makes you sick to your stomach. It took so much strength to write this book. I commend you Mr. Kincaid.
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