On hearing of the Duchess of Sussex’s alleged fondness for the Diabolo de Cartier Music Box (retailing for almost £3,000, in lacquered wood and gold-finish metal, freed bird motif turns when ‘La Vie En Rose’ plays), I reflected on the adult liking for childish things.
Though the box is ostensibly for Meghan’s infant daughter Lilibet Ltd – sorry, Lilibet Diana – a source told Australia’s New Idea magazine that ‘Meghan has fallen in love with Cartier’s absolutely divine music boxes.’ It’s not hard to think of the Duchess of Montecito sitting alone at dusk as the poignant tune about living one’s best life plays, pondering her next move, while Harry and the kids get on with some finger-painting elsewhere in the vast mansion.
The adult predilection for the sweet can sometimes seem somewhat sinister. We’re familiar with the the ‘Uncanny Valley’ theory (that as robots appear more human, they become more appealing – but only up to a point) and this also applies to childish things.
The music box is a great example. When in 1598 the Flemish clockmaker Nicholas Vallin invented a clock with a pinned barrel playing multiple tuned bells mounted within or when in 1796, the clockmaker Antoine Favre-Salomon of Geneva replaced the bells with a rack of multiple pre-tuned metallic notes in order to reduce space, I’d wager that they didn’t predict that in 1970 a little girl in Bristol (it was I) would be staring murderously at her own lovely music box, adoring the little whirling dancer and equally wanting to pluck out and crush the dainty doll for dancing ceaselessly to someone else’s tune. That year a series called Wicked Women was shown on TV: based on real-life cases of Victorian murderesses the theme tune was called ‘Crepe De Chine’ and was played on a music box, the dynamic between repressive femininity and female fury crystallised perfectly.
Like the ballerina in the music box, dolls are idealised females, from Tiny Tears to Barbie – but dolls had a dark side long before they became actual life-size sex-partners for sad adults. In popular music, they range from the pristine Living Doll yearned for by Cliff Richard (‘Gonna lock her up in a trunk so no big hunk can steal her away from me’) to the sad and sorry creature sung about by Courtney Love in ‘Doll Parts’ (‘I am doll parts, bad skin, doll heart, it stands for knife, for the rest of my life’) – forever passive.
In the successful recent Evil Doll films, which creatures designed solely to be pretty run amok; the most recent, M3GAN, was at her most appealing when she sang one of my favourite songs – Sia’s glittering and impervious ‘Titanium’ – to her young charge as a lullaby. At that moment, she seemed far more human than all the hipster idiots around her – even if the next moment she was pulling someone’s ear off.
In the forthcoming Barbie film, we cannot expect the titular character – wrapped in the gung-ho female-friendly star-power of Margot Robbie – to join the Society For Cutting Up Men.
But there is little doubt that there will be many cries of ‘You go, girl!’ from the large groups of grown women who will flock to see this ‘empowering’ celebration of doll-hood. And why shouldn’t they?
For many years grown men have been the driving force behind endless superhero franchises. A friend recalls going to see the new Spiderman animation and wondering: ‘Why are all these children here?’
Being a Kidult – ‘an adult whose interests or media consumption is traditionally seen as more suitable for children’ – is generally harmless. It may be a comfort, as in a world of constant catastrophising it’s understandable if one can sleep better beneath a Superman duvet. It’s when the sexual lines between what are childish things and adult things are blurred when the trouble starts.
Grooming is the grim sexual reaper of our time, but when a respectable company like Tesco promoted actual pole-dancing kits as toys (complete with ‘Peekaboo Dollars’ to tuck in the ‘sexy garter’) back in 2006 and Woolworths marketed a range of ‘Lolita’ bedroom furniture for girls in 2010, you know there’s something big and weird going on. I thought we’d seen the last of nonces as a persecuted minority with the downfall of the Paedophile Information Exchange.
But here they come again with a lovely flag and the slightly nicer name of MAPs – Minor Attracted People. And for every one who declares themselves a proud MAP, who knows how many are keeping it as Their Little Secret?
I’d bet that a lot of the ‘educators’ currently drilling kinky sex into the heads of small children get a thrill from doing so. Not all of them, but it’s likely that we are loathe as a society to admit just how many people – the vast majority of them men – are paedophiles, in theory or in practice.
While childhood is sexualised by some outliers, the age at which adults lose their virginity is rising: a 2018 survey found that one in eight 26-year-olds had never had sex, as opposed to the previous generation’s one in 20.
The Love Island contestants seem so young for their age, like children dressed up in adult’s clothing, smirking about sex positions but with ‘lipsing’ their childish word for kissing. These are the children of online porn and Covid, desperate for love but stuck in emotional isolation, living their best lives behind a screen; like children, they seem happiest in single-sex groups.
In Japan, half a million young men – the hikikomori – have forsaken real life for online gaming and pornography, leading the Japanese government to label it as ‘celibacy syndrome’. Nearly half of young Japanese women and more than a quarter of their male contemporaries have no interest in sex, causing the Japanese Family Planning Association to predict a massive one-third plunge in the country’s population by 2060. Many young men worldwide prefer pornography to women, while many young women prefer vibrators to men.
It’s likely that we are loathe as a society to admit just how many people – the vast majority of them men – are paedophiles, in theory or in practice
The detachment of sex from procreation was a great step forward in civilisation in general and the lives of women in particular – but yoking it to endless ‘playing’ with ourselves often seems a step too far the other way, as the Soma of self-abuse soothes a fractious humanity.
We are ceaselessly urged to be more ‘playful’. I’ve had enough fun for nine lifetimes, but I’m sceptical. All work and no play may well make us dull, but all play and no work makes us ocean-going bores. We know that carving out an adult life, action by action, will be far more likely to lead to substantial happiness – but increasingly many of us cannot seem to do this, particularly the young generation who should be especially eager to get going.
Some of this is down to youngsters never leaving or else returning to the family home due to the price of property. But some of it must be laid at the door of those who fail to launch. Research at the end of last year by City & Guilds found that one in ten young people who have not yet entered the workforce said they weren’t fussed about doing so. This spring, a Commons paper called ‘Why Are Young People Leaving The Labour Market? stated that:
Economic inactivity, the proportion of people who are neither working nor looking for work, has risen since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. This trend is evident among young people, with an increase in those who are leaving education and not entering the labour market.
Writing in The Spectator, Mary Wakefield mentions the American psychologist Jean Twenge’s ‘slow life’ theory – that each new generation extends childhood and delays the age of responsibility. If teens in the West these days don’t drink, date or have sex as much as previous generations, it’s not because they’re more mature, but because they’re developing later. Could this also be an explanation for the explosion of trans kids? What if Gen Z has pushed the cult of childhood too far and is simply refusing to grow up?’
We live in a civilised country, and it may be impossible for us to force people to work; particularly the young, who we think of as eternal victims – of the Covid, of the mental health panic, of the social media maelstrom. Fair enough. As long as we are prepared for them to stay marooned in their childhood bedrooms indefinitely as the freed bird twirls on the music box and the melody of ‘La Vie En Rose’ recalls a very adult, autonomous, adventurous 20th century idea of liberty and love. The children are surrounded by toys which have outgrown them – and maybe waiting for an adult to tell them to put away childish things and do something with their one and only precious life.
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