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

[nostoi.livejournal.com]

Indeed they are, and it's to their and our detriment. And not only about sexual matters, either. The message we give to children is that their opinion and feelings count for nothing because they are not mature enough to be able to think for themselves. And this has now progressed to the stage where young adults are seen as children still and treated as such.

BTW - I had sado-masochistic sexual fantasies when I was 6 and was masturbating at 8. I wonder how extensive these types of feelings and experiences are in children generally?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

You're right, it's not just about sex. Adults have always been afraid for- and afraid of- the kids. Back in the 50s there was a moral panic about comic books. Now it's computer games and the internet.

I think most people censor their childhood memories. I don't believe you and I were at all abnormal.