19.02.2009

Dad scandal and patriarchy

James Turley looks at the latest moral panic

Alfie Patten is an ordinary 13-year-old boy, though he looks younger than his years. He loves “computer games, boxing and Manchester United” (well, nobody’s perfect).

But this young teenager has become the epicentre of the latest moral panic to hit Britain. When he was still 12, he had a single sexual encounter with his girlfriend. Unlucky (and apparently sexually undereducated), the two conceived a child. The girl, Chantelle Steadman - slightly older at 15 - has now given birth to a daughter.

The story was broken by The Sun (February 13), in an extended article (by that rag’s standards) which hovers between the shock-horror and ‘human interest’ registers. Interviewed were the young couple, their own parents and a few commentators - David Cameron lamented a Britain in which “children are having children”, while Gordon Brown could be drawn only to reaffirm his concern with the problem of teenage pregnancy.

Life, the Christian anti-abortion charity, on the one hand praised Patten and Steadman for not terminating the pregnancy and, on the other, fretted about the failure of “value-free” sex-education. (Of course, nothing is truly “value-free” - what they mean is secular sex education, however painfully inadequate it is in this country).

The Sun is largely implicit in its shock and horror; photographs are carefully staged to emphasise Alfie’s youth (not that he needs much help), and litters the text with little details (eg, his “voice has not yet broken”). The Daily Mail cannot even muster that restraint, and puts the reactionary bilge front and centre. Melanie Phillips, a failed liberal turned ultra-Tory lunatic, penned a representative op-ed piece (February 16) castigating the “sheer madness of sex education that teaches nothing about morality”. It results only in “premature sexual activity”, and the bottom line is a “cycle of abandonment, emotional chaos and harm” (go on, Mel, tell us what you really think).

It is worth introducing a little perspective here. Having a child in the present state of society is a major commitment and often a somewhat thankless task. For teenage parents it is a still more difficult scenario for obvious reasons. Alfie and Chantelle are comparatively lucky in that they come from large families themselves (Alfie has eight siblings and half-siblings, and Chantelle four). It is unlikely that teenage children from large families will be completely ignorant of the rigours of childcare.

In other words, this event is not a life-ruining catastrophe by any means - any sane individual will know that. Alfie was unlucky on his first time; life goes on. The gutter press knows it too - hence the major focus of the follow-up coverage on effectively slandering the protagonists in this little drama. Chantelle may have had other sexual partners; will she have a paternity test (the ultimate Jeremy Kyle/Jerry Springer set piece)?

In a particularly breathtaking failure of metaphorical imagination, the Mail on Sunday (February 15) ran a front page photograph of Dennis Patten, Alfie’s father, wearing a devil costume - the boy’s parents were involved in a “tawdry battle” to make money out of media deals (as opposed to the highly dignified battle for shock-horror front pages between the Mail and its rivals, of course). Perhaps the paper is unaware that raising an extra child is an expensive business?

The whole ‘dad at 13’ scandal is, then, another iteration of the astonishing moral hypocrisy of the rightwing press (though the likes of The Guardian were not above weighing in), albeit one which is peculiarly rich in implications.

Firstly, we should deal with the substantive political issues. Having children is something close to a right, but one which it is particularly necessary to exercise carefully at a time of one’s own choosing. However bullish Alfie Patten and Chantelle Steadman may be about their intentions to bring up their baby well, it is plain enough that this pregnancy was unplanned.

For the modern moralist, it is simply wrong for adolescents to have children (something that would have come as a bit of a surprise to most societies throughout history - not least to an omniscient Creator, who has unaccountably created His subjects to reach peak fertility at precisely that age), and an index of ‘moral decay’. In reality, the vast majority of adolescents simply do not want children - the problem with teenage pregnancy is, on one level, no more complicated than that. (They want sex, of course - but the idea that sex is primarily or ‘naturally’ for making babies is as risible as the idea that cars are ‘naturally’ for driving to Swindon.)

That is one of the main reasons quality sex education is worth fighting for. Just as ‘trade secrets’ cement the power of the capitalists over the workplace, just as ‘official secrets’ protect capitalist political power against challenge, the persistence of ‘sex secrets’ guarantees that young sexual partners will get it wrong - that, in other words, they will act like precisely the naive children moralism supposes them to be, and be consequently more reliant on the ideological apparatuses.

And despite our age’s claims to enlightenment, sex education remains dire. The myths surrounding contraception are astonishingly widespread - 16% of British students, it was revealed a couple of years ago, believe that two condoms are better than one - and they did not mean for two separate sessions (The Guardian April 24 2007). Another interesting piece in the same paper (July 18 2008) revealed the continuing prevalence of the belief that an empty crisp packet will suffice - provided, naturally, the crisps are cheese and onion flavour.

On a broader scale, modern Britain suffers direly from what Sartre would call an “objective neurosis” about adolescent sexuality. “Raunch culture” is, it should be said, not a total myth - it genuinely is the case that sexual connotations are widely used in order to sell products both material and cultural to teenagers. There are lines of ‘alluring’ make-up aimed specifically at young girls and pop bands who trade on sexuality - the Pussycat Dolls originated as a burlesque striptease act and have not changed drastically since ...

Arrayed against that, there is the resurgence of radicalised Christianity in particular and religion in general, with its associated abstinence movements and virulent championing of monogamous marital sex. The extremes meet, but do not dilute each other (see, for example, Beyoncé Knowles, the R and B diva, who often attempts to justify her preference for tiny shorts in slightly spurious Christian terms).

The result is obvious enough - a state of perpetual tension, in which desires are produced and repressed in an alternating movement; commodity production hegemonises desire-production, and reactionary forces hegemonise the repression. These forces have come to completely marginalise any alternative articulations of sexuality, including those we might consider healthier.

On the contrary, it should be stated clearly that adolescent sex is a perfectly acceptable thing; that exploration of those hormone-ridden bodies is both inevitable and in fact positive under the right social circumstances. It is no accident that moralism is so concerned to prevent those social circumstances from coming about - after all, it is precisely in its interests that adolescent encounters be as traumatic and degraded as possible; the reactionary right wants its teenage sex furtive, rushed and cheese-and-onion-sheathed, as a warning to others. We want it relaxed, well-informed ... and, god forbid, enjoyable.

There is a final undertone to the case, which flows from the young Alfie Patten’s immaturity. It is assumed, of course, that he will be a ‘bad father’ (indeed, the awfulness of teenage parenting is a key moment in Melanie Phillips’ cycle of degradation); it is alleged that he is the son to another ‘bad father’.

When Melanie Phillips seeks to restore ‘morality’ to sex education, she means precisely ‘family values’ - the system of ideological articulations which is both engendered by and a support for patriarchal organisation. That is the final political truth of this scandal. Teenage sexuality is in this case a sacrificial lamb to the law of the father. And the necessarily farcical and hypocritical form taken by this ideology when it is extolled by the slavering reactionaries of the tabloid press does not make it any less of a threat.