BEAUTY IN THE EYES OF THE BEHOLDER: THE SHAPE OF EROTIC DESIRE FOR CHILDREN

My paper challenges the belief that images of girls were enjoyed by men because they found them reassuring, not titillating.. Recent scholars have produced overwhelming evidence of adult/child sexual contacts throughout U.S. history.

How has this desire been socially constructed?

A trove of materials from the early nineteenth century to the 1970s suggests that children  needing protection, especially girls, would devote their entire being to their male guardian. Often depicted in the tropes of romantic love, the girls are often saucy, eliding themselves with sexually experienced women. The male characters are soldiers or bachelors in homosocial environments with little interest in adult women or family. They want to be in close physical contact with the child who is their responsibility. And that desire motivates them to reorganize their lives around the child.

Little Orphan Annie is one of these narratives. James Whitcomb Riley’s 1885 poem memorializing a young servant from his childhood, “Little Orphant [sic] Annie,” quickly became required reading in public schools across the country.  The first Little Orphan Annie movie dates from 1918. Newspapers marked the death of the  “real” Annie in 1924, after which newspaper comics and Shirley Temple carried on the trope, which continued in musical versions on Broadway and film.

These narratives exist pornographic and mainstream culture. A cottage industry arose about female orphans and their male protectors; poetry and art work; live theater productions and film; and in the yellow press, where men enjoyed salacious details of sexual misconduct.