“That a sexually budding adolescent girl becomes the sudden object of predatory male attention has been the cause of parental anxiety down through the ages. When I was a young teenager in 1973, the horror movie The Exorcist took America by storm. It was a supernatural tale of the occult, but it also had within it a central idea that was at once culturally relevant and deeply terrifying: that as soon as a young girl came of sexual age, she became vulnerable to a new class of danger.”
This is Flanagan’s stock move — the turn in the story that hinges on “when I was” (or honestly perhaps just “I”). The editor in me wants to cut it out — it’s hardly essential to understand Flanagan (or, rather, to calculate her age periodically, by cultural signifier) to get her point, nor is it necessary to pull in The Exorcist as an example (even a good example, really) of the perceived danger of innocence threatened by sexual maturity.
January 14, 2012, 11:00am Comments
