Diversity on the prowl: don't go stereotyping child molesters.

IF "informed Americans" seem unable to get a handle on the country's social problems, it could be that the public forums of our vaunted Information Age are more committed to showing the extent of a problem than to doing anything about it.

Examine any social-problem show and you will find that it is set up in a certain way. First comes the maniacal calibration for balance and diversity among the guests, ensuring that the dead hand of predictability will prevail for the entire two hour special. Next comes the declaration of war against stereotypes and the promise to banish them. Then we get the "cuts across" announcement that goes: "This [crime, behavior, addiction, disease] cuts across our national life, afflicting Americans of every age, educational level, occupation, and socio-economic status." It is not necessary to include race-color-creed-gender here; they have already been taken care of in the guest lineup.

The latest topic to be taken up by the social-problem shows is pedophilia, which appears to be cutting across such a wide swath of America that it has taken shape in our minds as a map of flight patterns out of O'Hare. If Will Rogers never met a man he didn't like, informed Americans have never met a man who wasn't a child molester. In the cuts-across spiel they are described as "clergymen of all faiths," followed by the Big Three of the laity--doctors, lawyers, and business leaders. Then teachers, librarians, coaches, and camp counselors; followed by society's "backbone" of mailmen, truck drivers, and gas-station attendants; then the homeless, and finally, paroled pedophiles.

With this much diversity on the prowl nobody will ever be able to stereotype pedophiles again, which is the whole point as far as the producers are concerned. The informed American comes away from the social-problem show with no answers, just more information, and mental images far more frightening than yesteryear's discredited figure of the solitary, abnormal "sex fiend." Better one Bruno than the entire Chamber of Commerce, we mutter, but it's too late. The definition of the New Pedophilia is: "No child left behind by a cross-section of the community."

The cross-section now has more sections to it thanks to the New Immigration, which has created fresh hells for the guardians of political correctness, who must be especially alert when discussions of pedophilia get into "cultural differences," e.g., men with a legacy of machismo, or men from countries with a history of child brides.

This could get sticky but seasoned practitioners of the PC arts always find a way. Whenever anyone brushes too close to a recognizable profile, they use airline-security logic and attribute everything to everybody so that no one will have any individual characteristics whatsoever. Machismo? Look at Australians. Child brides? Look at Appalachia. It's a far, far better thing to create a tabula rasa than risk letting a stereotype slip by. This is why our debates never seem to go anywhere; there's not much you can say about a tabula rasa.

With an intellectual climate like this, it was only to be expected that John Mark Karr, the wannabe murderer of JonBenet Ramsey, would traumatize the entire country. The moment we laid eyes on him we knew it was impossible not to stereotype him. If anyone had ever gone beyond stereotype and into the realm of pure quintessence, it was he. With his pencil neck, his reedy little body, his trousers under his armpits, and his almost tangible air of total inadequacy he was the classic casting-office creep, and a WASP creep at that. It doesn't get any better than this.

During his brief gaudy hour on the tube he was America's vacation from the Information Age with its endless disclaimers. One look at him would stop an in-depth debate about pedophilia in its tracks; if you tried to include him in a cross-section all the other entrants would flee, which is why the media hated him: He was bad for business.

For me he offered a return to a world I know well: elderly Southern ladies who know, or claim to know, nothing about sex, who would view John Mark Karr through the prism of the gospel according to the old wives' tale. This world has a cuts-across tradition all its own. The most popular one is "change-of-life baby." Then there are "They say it runs in the family," and "They say it skips a generation." Either of these can refer to just about anything, is always received with wise nods, and holds out more melodramatic possibilities than listening to Greta and Nancy drone on about DNA. If you want to frustrate an over-analytical pest, say "It's just one of those things." And if you want to cause cardiac arrest among ding-dong feminists, say "His best girl is his mother."

Pedophilia is a serious problem, an "epidemic," as the media calls it, and we should investigate it, but not the way we are presently going about it. We should put aside the in-depth series and the comprehensive two-part specials and use a little imagination and common sense to understand how America encourages sexual lust for children.

Earlier this year a cross-section of professional men and backbones of society were surprised by NBC's Chris Hansen as they perched naked on a kitchen stool in his multi-part entrapment series. The show, a burlesque skit wrapped in a Victorian melodrama, starred Hansen as Thomas Trueheart, the wholesome, all-American avenger who catches rabbis as they traipse through the door singing out "I brought the condoms" to the teenage girl they think awaits them.

What makes men like this want sex with kids?

Maybe it's our long-established practice of throwing children at people. Take just one example from the advertising world: The Campbell's Soup kids used to be fat, comical cartoon figures but now they are real children, and the TV ads feature close-ups of their glistening mouths as they slurp up their noodles and try to twirl them with their tongues.

Maybe it's our movies. In From Reverence to Rape, film historian Molly Haskell objects to the inclusion of children in movies whose plots do not require them. Just offhand I can think of two movies made 40 years apart that contain intrusive and completely extraneous prepubescent girls. In Thunderhead, Son of Flicka (1945), the girl is the daughter of Gus, the Swedish ranch hand. In the Mary O'Hara novel on which the movie was based, Gus is a consummate bachelor and western loner who lives in the bunkhouse and has no personal life apart from his mute devotion to his employer. The girl does nothing in the movie except show off her cuteness and get in Roddy McDowell's way.

The other movie is Jaws: The Revenge (1987). The Widow Brody visits her son the oceanographer, who has a six-year-old daughter who never shuts up. She interrupts adult conversations with pointless drivel, squeals and laughs over everything, and coquettishly demands that Michael Caine teach her how to fly his plane. Her sole dramatic function is to be in the tourist boat that the shark pursues but the scene would have worked without her and the movie would have been cheaper to make: She's in practically every scene.

Another reason for our epidemic of pedophilia is one that belongs in the dare-not-speak-its-name category: Men want virgins. I can understand why. They find it flattering, and it brings sweetness and sensuality together in a heart-stopping way, as Charles Reade described in The Cloister and the Hearth: "She came to him glowing with two beauties never before united, an angel's radiance and a woman's blushes."

A normal, well-adjusted man wants an adult virgin, but they're in short supply nowadays so he goes on his way, indulging himself only in wistful thoughts. But the insecure man, or the psychologically damaged man, finding no adult virgins, might be tempted to go down the food chain until he found what he wanted.

It doesn't help matters that since September 11, 2001, America has heard more talk about virgins than at any time since the 1950s. There may be more to the War on Terror than we realize.

Florence King's NATIONAL REVIEW columns are collected in STET, Damnit!: The Misanthrope's Corner, 1991 to 2002.