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

[red-girl-42.livejournal.com]

I think you're right that children are not as "innocent" as we want to think they are. I know people who get very disturbed at the thought of young children masturbating, and I don't understand why. It feels good--why wouldn't they? I did it. I know my son does it. I used to have orgasms climbing ropes in gym class. I didn't know that's what they were, I just knew I really loved climbing ropes!

I wonder, however, if you're looking at the drive to de-sexualize young children from the wrong standpoint. Maybe the real purpose of it isn't to take children's sexual feelings away from them, but to keep adults from crossing that line and having sexual activity with children. If we as adults maintain an image of children as pristine, asexual beings, then perhaps it makes it easier to draw that line and refrain from treating them in a sexual way.

In other words, desexualizing children is a way of keeping adults from the temptation of having sex with prepubescent kids (if they are in fact so tempted). Perhaps the discomfort in admitting that kids have sexual fantasies and feelings comes from not wanting to seem like a pedophile. If you say that kids are sexual, does that mean you are saying it's okay to have sex with them? It's a lot easier to just say, "children have nothing to do with sex at all" then to have to explain that "yes, kids do have sexual urges but I don't think it's okay for adults to take advantage of that." Too many people are unable to detect that level of nuance, and will brand you a pedophile the instant "child" and "sex" appear in the same sentence.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

That's a very good point. I think you're right. If we acknowledged our children's sexuality- openly, frankly, freely- it would put us in a very dangerous place. What we're doing when we insist on keeping the little darlings unpolluted by the world is protecting ourselves.