But I Didn't Want To Be Safe

[poliphilo]

When I was four I developed an obsession with a girl called Carol and told her I wanted to eat her.  At around the same time I was having lurid fantasies about genitally-imprecise, gender-confused, sado-masochistic sex orgies. Slightly later I developed a big thing about cowboys with their shirts off, and- slightly later still- fell in love with the dark-skinned, half naked slave girl in an illustration to my children's edition of the Pilgrim's Progress.  There were Christian and Faithful striding patriarchally through Vanity Fair, manfully drawing attention to themselves- and there was she in the bottom left-hand corner of the plate, with her hair falling about her face and her breast hanging down just so, laying waste to Bunyan's allegory.  Balls to the celestial city,  I wanted her!

I was kept ignorant, but ignorance isn't innocence. Children are not innocent in the Victorian sense of the word. They are- as we've known since Freud- seethingly sexual and- just as important- insatiably curious.

So why this obsession with keeping their little minds pure? I can only suppose that most adults have- wilfully and ignorantly- forgotten what it's like to be a child.

If there'd been an internet when I was a kid I'd have been furious to know there were walls in place to keep me "safe"- and  I'd  have done everything in my power to circumvent them.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

So back then, when children reached puberty they started getting married and having children. But back then they didn't live so long, and didn't have education to get in the way. So maybe the protection today is because parents want their children to grow up and go to university and get a decent education, as opposed to getting married at 10? So maybe the changing starting age of sexual activity is in step with the sophistication/education of the society?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

What I'm saying is that you can't protect people from their own nature. Children are sexual beings and will have sexual fantasies and be sexually curious no matter how well "protected" they are.

Of course it's a good idea for people to get educated and put off marriage (or its equivalent) until they know their own minds- but this is a separate issue I think.

Sexual ignorance is certainly no protection against the traps of sexuality- in fact rather the opposite.