Question 1:
Are children inherently sexual beings?
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Question 1: Are children inherently sexual beings? |
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Of course children are inherently sexual. In fact, there are very good Darwinian reasons for them not just to exhibit sexuality but to exude it from birth. Children need not just love but physical love. They need hugs and kisses and dandling and cradling, and their palpable eroticism provokes those responses from adults -- as well it should. Likewise, children are born exuding gender. (It's always amazing how girlish baby girls can be, and how boyish baby boys. And when children are destined to be more sexually ambiguous, their nature is often unmistakable long before nurture has had a chance to kick in.) But strangely, the innate eroticism of children has little to do with gender. It has everything to do with a kind of omnisexual softness, cuddliness, freshness, sweetness. It's there to motivate love, not mating. In short, it has nothing to do with fucking. That should go without saying, but the moment you acknowledge the sexuality of children, solid citizens begin to tremble and worry and squirm. Is it a peculiar side-effect of the simple-minded fundamentalist stripe in American thinking that we can't imagine sexuality without sex acts? Or is it perhaps a side-effect, equally peculiar, of our hard-headed belief in progress, in one thing's always leading to the next, in results? In America, we believe that everything is cause and effect. Discoveries result in inventions, which result in capital, factories, fortunes. Violence on TV results, we suppose, in violence in the streets. Sexuality results in fucking -- and even the mention of the completely innocent sexuality of children results in evil thoughts. Evil thoughts, naturally, result in evil deeds. Or so we seem to think. (But I digress. Like crazy.) Nearly every parent experiences his or her child's eroticism, and I would worry about one who doesn't, or who blocks it from view. That parent, I think, lacks a vital component of paternal or maternal feeling, and the child is sure to sense -- and suffer from -- that lack. Besides, the joy you take in your child's deliciousness is one of the transforming rewards of parenthood. It's one of the reasons that being a parent is perhaps the most spiritually invigorating experience that adulthood has to offer. But I'd better stop here. You've got me blubbering like a friggin' self-help book. |
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