BY Lux Alptraum
January 23, 2007
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The Sundance Festival is this week, and if you’re the kind of person who pays any attention to the goings on in the indie film world, you’ve probably already heard all about “Hounddog,” one of the many films premiering at the festival.

For those of you who haven’t heard about the film, here’s the important part: Dakota Fanning, a twelve-year-old actress, plays Lewellen, a twelve-year-old girl who is raped, onscreen, by an older boy. And the press is losing its shit over this.

I – like many of the critics of this film – have not seen “Hounddog.” Unlike the critics of the film – some of whom outright refuse to see it – I don’t feel that this makes me qualified to offer up a critique of the movie itself. But I do want to touch on some of the issues raised by the controversy.

“Hounddog” is hardly the first piece of art to bring the discussion of adolescent sexuality to the table. Phoebe Gloeckner is a graphic novelist, most recently made famous by A Child’s Life and Diary of a Teenage Girl, both of which tell the story of Minnie, a fifteen-year-old girl who (like the teenage Gloeckner) has an affair with her mother’s boyfriend. During a reading at Bluestockings, Gloeckner touched on the difficulties of using art to depict the realities of teenage sexuality. “If I made a movie of this story, it would be labeled child pornography,” she commented. And yet this was a true story: something that had actually happened to her, something she had lived through.

We are so squeamish about adolescent sexuality, about the idea that young people can be sexual (though it is worth noting that the idea of the asexual child is a relatively recent one). We want to believe that children are innocent, unaware of the greater world around them, that, as Andrew Vachss, a child protection consultant and attorney, commented, “A 12-year-old girl can’t consent to any damn thing.”

And let’s set aside issues of agency and choice and consent, for the moment. Let’s focus in on one, singular issue: the fact that some twelve-year-olds do have sex, that some twelve-year-olds do get raped, that this is something we are pathologically incapable of having a conversation about.

We are terrified of sex and sexuality, and this is nowhere more apparent than in the issue of adolescent sexuality. We can’t cope with the idea of children, of adolescents, as sexual beings: can’t cope with the idea that children can have these experiences. And so we refuse to discuss, refuse to acknowledge that these things are real – and we push away the discussion, we hide from it, we wrap our children in a fluffy, white towel of ignorance, all in the name of protection. And we wring our hands in fear of all the bogeymen that surround us: the slutty teens, the neighborhood child molester – and we celebrate the fear, because it’s all we know how to do.

And then we rail against the producers of “Hounddog” for refusing to live by our rules, for forcing us to acknowledge the brutal, honest reality of the world around us. And we call them child pornographers, ignoring the fact that they have attempted to use their film as a starting point in a discussion of child rape.

And we tell Dakota Fanning that she is a child, that she is too young to decide that she wants to be a part of a movie that dares to go deeper, that peels back the layers of this story: because it’s easier this way, it’s easier to live in denial than confront the sticky, complicated reality that lies just beyond our comfort zone.

This piece originally appeared on Sexerati.