Hollywood is a little creepy

At the risk of sounding like Jerry Seinfeld (or maybe with the hope), what iiiiiiiis the deal with all the child sexuality in movies recently?

"Little Miss Sunshine," "You, Me, and Everyone We Know," "Squid and the Whale," and, most disturbingly, "Happiness," all have some depiction (ranging from suggestive, but cute to horrifying) of child sexuality. I'm not sure how to react to it because it pits my American prudish Puritanism and general concern for child welfare against my liberal desire to protect people's right to express sexuality in a manner of their choosing.

On the one hand, social norms concerning childhood sexuality vary widely between cultures with some cultures viewing sexual interaction between adults and young children as normal, whereas our own society strong adheres to the cult of the Innocent Child. So, I'm not going to deny that our ideas regarding children and sex are socially constructed. Moreover, there's hardly complete consensus in our own society about this issue. Philip Jenkins argues in Decade of Nightmares that one current of the Gay Rights Movement in the late 1970s was men pushing for the expansion of their "rights" to engage in sexual acts with boys. (I'm not familar enough with the history to endorse or reject this view, but do know that he's a very serious conservative with strong anti-child sexuality values as seen in his book, Beyond Tolerance: Child Pornography on the Internet). Likewise, the oft-satired folks at NAMBLA view themselves as sexually oppressed by wider society. I am totally not into oppression.

On the other hand, sex with kids is way fucked up coming from my cultural background. I doubt the ability of children to knowledgeably consent to sexual activity. Like anyone who has seen Law & Order SVU, I'm also aware that childhood sexual activity can be emotionally and physically debilitating.

So, what's child sexuality in all these movies? Perhaps it's because the contemporary generation of filmmakers grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, a era of oppression and reaction to the Free Love of the 1960s. Maybe through their movies, they are simply expressing the sexual confusion of their youths. Or maybe, as a society, we're simply recovering from a period in which we glorified the innocence of the child. We do have an incredibly child-centric culture and perhaps these filmmakers are in the vanguard of its critique.

What do you think?