God, children are so open...it’s not difficult to understand why parents do so much to try to close them.

A week after I sat down and wrote my feelings about the Kevin Bacon movie, The Woodsman, a story hit the headlines about a nine-year-old placed into prostitution by her mother.

I don’t like to imagine it, but exactly as some people had to say when an 11-year-old girl was raped and murdered by a man in his twenties — albeit reportedly mentally-challenged — last year, I’m sure there were echoes of, “She musbe wanted it.”

In The Woodsman, attempts were made to humanise the lead character—himself a molester of little girls; and to demonstrate the different levels of child sexual abuse that exist.

Watching the film, I kept trying to be open, to keep equilibrium, to “feel” his side, to understand what conditioned him and made him choose to do what he did.

Thank God I couldn’t do it. See, this is not like trying to relate to a straight woman having fantasies about Pink to “get off.” This is not even about adult men thinking dirty thoughts about barely teen girls as they’re humping their middle-aged wives.

This is about one person insinuating something on somebody else—a whole other individual person with rights and feelings however young they may be.

A doctor said to me last week, “A murderer doesn’t want to be a murderer.” My first thought was, “A murder victim doesn’t want to be a murder victim. But they didn’t have a choice. Want or not, a murderer has a choice.”

Oh but I appreciate the “conditioning” too. Rapists, pedophiles, pederasts: we make these men. Correction...YOU make these men. You make them want little girls, then try to punish them for it.

From Disney down does it—sexualising almost teens gals and making them objects of older men’s craving, appetite, lust.

On one episode of Law and Order Special Victims Unit, there was a “convention” of pedophiles talking about the pleasure they get watching PG-13 and younger films, since the little girls are so sexualised.

Or like the stand-up comic—obese, middle-aged, hairy—saying a few years ago, after Britney Spears first broke onto the scene, “You ever see the real Britney fans...men my age.”

And it’s oh so funny, right? But it’s not funny at all to hear a question like the one Mos Def’s detective character asks Bacon’s in The Woodsman, “You ever seen a seven-year-old sodomised in half?”

You heard me: as in a tiny little girls body ripped in half by a big man’s buggery.

But Bacon’s character makes a distinction. “I never hurt them!” He says. But will he ever have the chance to ask any of his victims when they have all grown up?

He will never have the chance to hear one of them say, “I can’t even have an orgasm with the men I love. Because I can’t open up. I can’t quite ever get past that dirty, silencing, heart-fear feeling when I’m touched by a man. I can’t always breath when I’m touched, even as a grown woman by a man I’ve chosen to know and love. And I still have bad dreams, dread dreams, even waking dreams that send my blood cold—barely running blood, as though frozen in my blood.

“This is pain, This hurts. You did this to me. But to you—only to you, not to me—you ‘never hurt me’.”

In the film there’s this moment where a little girl, so confused, is prepared to sit upon a strange man’s lap because her daddy makes her do the same; even though when her daddy makes her do it she’s moved to tears and shame.

Ignorant people see the surface consent, though, and think, as they are prone to, “She wanted it. She consented.”

And that makes it all right in their eyes. They figure she knew her mind.

Yet, if a seven-year old girl wanted to have sex with a boy her own age they’d say, “They can’t know her own mind.” See the hypocrisy?

There isn’t a person alive who can convince me they’ve never done something they really didn’t want to do: something for which they later felt sad, shamed, scorned and sorry.

A child may “go along” with an adult’s advances; that doesn’t mean their souls and bodies weren’t menaced. That doesn’t mean they wanted it.

Come good.

Tomorrow’s Brew: