04 Apr 2008
O'Searcaigh Shame
I am open-mouthed at the Fairytale of Kathmandu affair, not at the sadly predictable pillorying of Cathal Ó Searchaigh before we've heard a word from the alleged victims, but at the irrational attitudes it has thrown up.
The director of Fairytale, Neasa Nì Chianáin, is not alone in feeling scruples about the inequality of power between comparatively rich Westerners and poor people in the developing world. The film she started making with Cathal Ó Searchaigh was premised on it, whether she realised it or not, but what made her uneasy was that he had sex with young men whose neediness, she felt, compromised their consent.
As a culture we are very squeamish about intergenerational sex, assuming either that the older person is being taken for a ride by a gold-digger or that the younger person is being manipulated by the older one. Not all cultures have felt the same. Less than a hundred years ago, in this country, it was seen as normal for an older man, now financially secure, to marry a woman young enough to have plenty of children. Feminism shone a light on the way such customs both resulted from and perpetuated the inequality of women, but this discourse of inequality of power is - or should be - very complex.
In ancient Greece it was part of growing up to have an older lover to mentor you in sex, manners, the ways of the world and what it is to be a man. It was much the same in France, except that the mentor had to be a woman. This still happens; in due course the younger person moves on, and the older person lets him or her go (and is often the more heart-broken of the two). That this sort of relationship has been collapsed uncritically into abuse is reductive - you have to look at what's actually going on. I don't know enough to comment on the Fairytale case, but I have observed a number of intergenerational relationships; in some I thought the younger partner benefited greatly from the nurturing and mentoring of the older partner; in others I felt uneasy about the vulnerability of the younger one.
This country is so racked with guilt about the way vulnerable children and young people were abused in institutions that it is not easy to have a mature debate about young people's sexuality. Part of the problem is that we don't seem to distinguish sufficiently between the capacities of children and adolescents. We infantilise our young people, especially, though by no means exclusively, in relation to sexual matters.
How do young people learn about sex? (I mean the 'it' of it, not the nuts and bolts, and the discussions about maturity, and the warnings about pregnancy and STDs beloved of sex education programmes.) If we remember how we felt - eager, hormone-driven, oblivious to risk, feeling powerful because we were desired (at last), careless of anyone's feelings but our own - we feel a tenderness and protectiveness towards the young, and if that informs a sexual relationship, it can't be all bad. It's often not that way, of course; most of us were hurt and disappointed by lovers barely more sexually and emotionally competent than ourselves, but we dusted ourselves off and went off to look for something better. It is not helpful to underestimate the strength and agency of young people, especially those who have been taught to have a sense of their own self-worth.
There is certainly an issue in the Ó Searcaigh case, but Nì Chianáin's behaviour has been, to say the least, dubious. I don't doubt that she was genuinely concerned about the young men, but she should surely have told Ó Searcaigh that her film was becoming something quite other than the one he agreed to participate in. It was unconscionable to take advantage of her subject, not to warn him that the film was turning into an exposé.
According to the Irish Examiner, "she passed tapes to health authorities in Ireland, after her funders became concerned about some of the material in the documentary." Not that troubled herself, so. And as Máire Mhac an tSaoi said on Liveline, why are we only hearing about it now, two years later, just as the film screens at the Dublin International Film Festival? As a final irony, the film's publicists have, incredibly, chosen a picture which might have been used as an ad for sex tourism.
No doubt the HSE is obliged to report suspicions to the Gardaí, who are obliged in turn to contact the Nepali police. The Sexual Offences Act provides for an Irish person to be prosecuted here for having sex abroad with someone below the Irish age of consent, even the young person is over the age of consent in their own country. Abusive sex-tourism should certainly be contested, but good intentions aside, you would wonder what our legislature thinks 'age of consent' actually means. It may be one-size-fits-all, but it is the point a particular culture has chosen to mark a young person's transition from vulnerability to responsibility, a consensus of which the young themselves are part. It is not for us to take that dignity from them.