“The LA Times recently ran a story about the Child Exploitation Section of the Toronto Sex Crimes Unit, which contained a mind-boggling statistic: of the more than 100 offenders the unit has arrested over the last four years, ‘all but one’ has been ‘a hard-core Trekkie…’ So why would sexual deviants be attracted to Star Trek? The link between Star Trek and pedophilia is obscure, even to the detectives in the sex crimes unit: ‘It has something to do with a fantasy world where mutants and monsters have power and where the usual rules don’t apply,’ Det. Constable Warren Bulmer told the LAT. ‘But beyond that I can’t really explain it…’ So if the pedophiles are identifying with the crew members, who do the monsters represent? Possibly aspects of the pedophile’s mind that are split off because they are unthinkable, and projected into someone else. On the Enterprise, aggressive impulses aren’t battling it out with libidinal ones as they are here on earth. In the Star Trek universe, every ‘bad’ impulse is attributed to an external force. When it comes to sex, for example, it’s always an outside influence that takes possession of the crew’s minds and bodies, causing them to behave in erotically driven ways. Child molesters have a similar mechanism at work. They deny having any sexual impulses themselves; they frequently claim that it was the children who seduced them. There is another aspect of Star Trek that likely makes it irresistible to perverts. It is utopian, in the sense that all the differences and distinctions which create tensions here on earth have been eradicated. Despite their exaggerated sexual characteristics, for example, the crew members are citizens of a utopian interracial and interplanetary world where the usual conflicts associated with gender do not apply… Think of Michael Jackson. He has attempted to eradicate just about every sexual, generational, and racial difference — and to construct an alternate utopian reality in Neverland. While there is certainly a futuristic quality to his clothing and mask-like facial features, it is unclear whether he watches Star Trek or just looks as if he does.” —Yahoo (US)

PervScan also featured the LA Times article linking pedophilia with Star Trek. At the time, PervScan noted the connection but didn’t quite know what to make of it. If anything, the odd conjunction of perversion and trek-ophilia seemed like it might have been a statistical fluke, the result of a small sample size or anecdotal evidence not rigorously interpreted. But now Ellen Ladowsky, author of the above article and former love interest of comedian Steve Martin, takes a serious, thoughtful look at the connection. It’s a fascinating article, so go read it if you have a few minutes.

In essence, Ms. Ladowsky argues that two things about Star Trek appeal to pedophiles. First, its externalization of “bad” impulses speaks to the pedophile’s tendency to disavow his own urges. Second, its utopian viewpoint echoes the pedophile’s fantasy world in which relations between adult and child are no longer subject to the censure they receive in reality. Both hypotheses seem relatively plausible. However, they certainly don’t exhaust the connection. After all, there are other pursuits that combine disavowal and utopianism. Why don’t pedophiles choose these? Why do they prefer Star Trek to, say, Star Wars or J.R. Tolkien or Mr. Rogers?

It’s a difficult question to answer. Certainly you have to account for the fact that Trekkies are already, like pedophiles, obsessive. Repetition must be a key factor: Trekkies enjoy reruns of the same stories, and pedophiles seek to relive the pleasures of youth. In either case, there is a resistance to change or maturation. And perhaps in addition to this psychological component there is a simple historical factor. A typical pedophile today tends to fit a certain profile: white, male, middle-aged, etc. Men of this sort are precisely the demographic that grew up in the 1960s and 1970s watching television reruns, which is why their obsessions tend more toward Star Trek than toward Wagnerian opera. (Now that would be peculiar: imagine if pedophiles were all obsessed with Parsifal.)

At any rate, these are just tentative hypotheses about a truly bizarre conjunction. You can go to the bookstore today and buy the Physics of Star Trek and the Ethics of Star Trek, so perhaps it won’t be long before you can also pick up the Psychopathia Sexualis of Star Trek — which, come to think of it, wouldn’t be so distant a cousin to Supervert’s own Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish.

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