CONNECT/Eddie Holt: Perhaps there is little left to say about the Tim Allen case. The media, especially the press, has already feasted on the crime and shame of the former celebrity chef, re-casting him as an odious ogre.
However, now that the feeding frenzy (for once, that cliché has contextual relevance) has abated, it's not only Allen who seems obscene.
Certainly, his crime was repulsive and the leniency of his sentence questionable. Debates over the precise gravity of his offence will continue. It wasn't victimless, but was it more vicarious than vicious? If it was, does that in any way diminish it? Is it dangerous even to consider gradations of revulsion about a vice so sordid? Who knows? One thing we do know is that elements in the media behaved barbarously. Allen deserved thorough condemnation (then again, the entire media idiocy about "celebrity chefs" deserves condemnation!) but not the obscene and sanctimonious venom some papers spat at him. Mind you, had he been the proprietor of Gus's Greasy Spoon, his damnation would not have been so public or so severe.
Clearly, his "celebrity" and wealth - judged by many people, perhaps correctly, to have saved him from a jail stretch - cost him too. Formerly feted by consumer culture, he is now damned by that same culture. But remember that the child-pornography he viewed existed to make sicko "entrepreneurs" about $1 million a month profit. In that sense, its reason for being was perfectly consistent with the dominant value of contemporary culture.
Of course, most people baulk at the commodification of human beings, especially that of children. None the less, in a culture in which more and more entities, including people, are accorded a price, sexual exploitation for profit, as well as for gratification, can hardly surprise us. After all, lawful advertising and popular culture repeatedly sexualise young teenagers.
Sure, it's different. It's not criminal and it's not pornographic in the sense of being explicitly sexual but it's often lascivious. The last decade, for instance, has seen an infestation of boy bands warbling at pre-pubescent girls. They do so because there is a market to be plundered. There is a market because many children nowadays have access to money, and where there's money, there's advertising.
In turn, that advertising flatters children by pretending to treat them as more grown-up than they actually are. The flattery works to flog boy bands, TV shows (to carry yet more advertising) and make-up to little girls. The boys get wildly overpriced replica football shirts, merchandised junk and even hair gel, presumably to complement the girls' make-up. Wonderful, eh? There's nothing illegal about any of that, although it's hardly morally commendable. Many of our great business warriors, however, insist that saying as much is prissy and precious - sanctimonious, really. "Sure what's the harm? The kids enjoy it. Making and selling these things keeps people in jobs. You must have little to worry you. It's the economy, stupid. Live in the real world. Lighten up. Get a life."
And so it goes - the pre-fab put-downs designed to drown out all opposition to market values are machine-gunned at objectors. There is only one "reality". Then comes something like the Tim Allen case or child-porn cases involving other "celebrities" - pop stars, impresarios, film or TV people. Then the damnation unleashed from such "modern" minds is Old Testament in its ferocity.
It's not that consumer culture has invented paedophilia. We know that from the rash of clerical child-sex abuse cases. But there is a particularly ignorant and sanctimonious note in the presumption that now, in "sophisticated", post-Catholic Ireland, we have got beyond the awful sexual repression that gave rise to so much abuse. Indeed, the vehemence of much media reaction to Tim Allen arguably reflects anger that he has let down wealthy, celebrity, non-Catholic Ireland. The appalling vista this opens up is that the new country might not, after all, be any better than the demonised old one. Contemporary crimes were supposed to emanate from greed and material ambition, not from perverted lust.
The conditions of different eras to facilitate abuse are different, of course, but the perverted urges are remarkably resilient. Nobody can know the extent of contemporary paedophilia - direct or vicarious - and nobody can know just how rife or rare it was in other times. But awareness of it is greater now than ever before. In one respect this is beneficial. People are more on guard for their children. But there's a shadow to this awareness too. In a society already atomising because of competition and excessive regard for individual initiative - the absurd lionising of entrepreneurs - the further breakdown of trust adds to communal paranoia and pushes us all further apart.
Meanwhile, the flesh media - the "she's a cracker" or "he's a hunk" junk - grows more hysterical as it grows more salacious. There probably is little harm done (to most people) by smutty pictures in newspapers and magazines. But if you make much of your profits from publishing these, you do relinquish at least part of your claim on moral probity.
Anyway, the entire sorry Allen episode and the rash of other high-profile paedophile scandals have been not only disgusting but also dismaying. Few believe the law distinguished itself in the Allen case, and the media certainly didn't. Aside from the lurid press condemnations of a lurid case, there was, as ever when wealth is in difficulty, the lurid presence of a PR operation.
Like so many front-page scandals, the Allen case erupted for a few days and then vanished. The damage done to children by paedophiles and profiteers doesn't vanish so readily, of course. Young lives are routinely destroyed. Allen's is too. But at least he has had one. The children haven't. Beyond that, there probably is little left to say.