Question 1:
Are children inherently sexual beings?
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Question 1: Are children inherently sexual beings? |
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Wow. Three of the four words in this question (all except "are") could inspire -- indeed, have inspired -- ten libraries-full of debate. What's a "child"? Somebody who's two, eleven, seventeen? A seven-year-old miner in Liverpool in 1860? A 10-year-old prostitute in Bangkok in 1998? Your brother-in-law in Cleveland, who's thirty-six? "Sex"? Is that what the fetal fingers do when they diddle the fetal penis? (Or is it, as some biologists argue, just a form of self-soothing, like thumb-sucking?) Is sex Johnny and Janey pulling down their Osh Kosh B'goshes and poking each others' anuses? (Or is that, as the child-raising columnists always put it, "curiosity"?) Is sex kissing? (Not to the Burmese.) Fellatio? (Not to the President.) Intercourse? (Not, perhaps, to a rape victim.) Okay, "inherently": Was a girl in the eighteenth century, who was married, bedded and nursing a baby by thirteen, living out some biological -- that is, natural, genetically inherited -- instinct of desiring, copulating and reproducing when puberty struck? What about the flat-chested 1998 nine-year-old dolled up like a Spice Girl and sucking face with the boy (or girl) next door like they do on "Dawson's Creek," but who will wait until she's twenty-six and married to lose her virginity because first she was busy with basketball, then with business school, and then she converted to fundamentalist Christianity? Both girls are creatures of culture, and there's little if anything inherent in how they behave. The answer to the question, then: yes and no, but mostly no. Yes, humans have bodies, which from birth appear to seek pleasurable touch as surely as slugs seek moisture; and yes, that pleasure-generating touch eventually finds the genitals and other culturally designated erogenous zones. But beyond that, as the sexologist Leonore Tiefer says, the only thing natural (or inherent) about humans is culture. That goes for both childhood and sex, which are historical and cultural artifacts, with myriad variations around the globe, in flux through time, and under almost continual contest. |
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