Ann Althouse writes:

Is it just art, or is there a particular love in Hollywood film art of the forbidden love between the adult and child?
I thought I saw a pedophilia trend in the most honored films of 2008.

She wrote in December:

I’m seeing all the well-reviewed year-end movies, and there’s an awful lot of wrong-age sex. “Doubt” is about a priest accused of molesting children. “Benjamin Button,” with its backwards aging character, had scenes of an old man in love with a young girl and an old woman in love with a toddler. “The Reader” had a 36-year-old woman seducing a 15-year-old boy. “Milk” had a man in his 40s pursuing relationships with much younger (and more fragile) men. “Slumdog Millionaire” shows a young teenage girl being sold for sex. I say that Hollywood is delivering pedophiliac titillation with the deniability of artistic pretension.

Hard not to think of Mary Eberstadt’s series from the late Nineties, which she wrapped up with:

At a time when almost every kind of advocacy comes equipped with statistical batteries, it should come as no surprise that pedophiles and their allies, too, have acquired their own pseudo-scientific apparatus. Only the unsophisticated would be surprised to find such a numerological polemic put forward by a reputable publishing house and advertised in the Barnes and Noble book catalog. But then, only the unsophisticated stand in need of the reeducation its pages offer. And there, to return to the figure of Larry Don McQuay, is where the matter of pedophilia chic would seem to stand. In one corner, enraged parents from across the country screaming for help in protecting their children; in the other, desiccated salonistes who have taken to wondering languidly whether a taste for children’s flesh is really so indefensible after all. And they wonder why there’s a culture war.