Customs or social mores have also played a heavy controlling role simply by creating in the individual, from earliest childhood on, the profoundly disturbing conviction that he or she is somehow out of step, bad, abnormal, solitary, or degenerate for no matter what genital sexual behavior."
-(MARY Calderone, M.D., seventy-three-year-old great-grandmother,
president of SIECUS (Sex Information and Education Council of
the United States), and former director of the Planned Parenthood Federation
IF CHILDREN are allowed and encouraged to experience erotic
pleasure, won't they talk more about sex, experiment with
each other, and begin making love at an earlier age? Of
course they will. But the changes will scarcely approach
earthshaking proportions. It has been more than two and a
half decades since Kinsey first dared to study our sexual habits,
yet only recently has a perceptible change in the onset of
adolescent sex activity been noted. This is in spite of readily
available contraception, abortions, parental permissiveness,
sex education, and erotic movies. The decision to commence
sexual intercourse is multidetermined.
It depends upon the
person's relationship to his parents, degree and kind of sexual
responsibility, perceived sociocultural values, early experiences,
religious background, and the availability of a
suitable mate.
No matter how freely a girl may discuss sex
and entertain thoughts of an alternative life style, she is not
likely to choose to bed with a boy early if she dislikes her
father or if she fears all males. If we begin to encourage eroticism
we may expect children to show more erotic interest
and enthusiasm.
They are likely to seek sexual outlets earlier.
Whether this includes intercourse depends upon many
factors. Many adolescents continue to defer intercourse until
adulthood, or until they can feel really comfortable with the
opposite sex. Masturbation is a reasonable, readily available
substitute, and an important step in the enhancement of the
erotic response.
Fantasies of a more substantial union are a
time-honored expedient, now more acceptable to the female.
Yet encouraging our children's erotic development is scary.
It depends on one basic assumption: that sex (like vitamins)
is constructive and desirable. If so, then we want our children
to experience plenty of good, nourishing, healthy sex.
This does not mean any and every kind of erotic experience,
for some are highly destructive. Incest has emotional and
social consequences. Sex to exploit or degrade a child is
vicious.
Restricting a child to quasi-seductive, subliminal sex
in his own house provokes enormous rage. We need to protect
our children, but not protect them out of the entire arena.
The incidence of adult sexual impairment is appalling.
Only a fraction of those who need treatment can find and
afford it.
This needless waste results from our irrational
expectation that a fully inhibited "nice" child should evolve,
without encouragement or guidance, into a sexually competent,
highly erotic adult. Sex clinics can treat dysfunctions,
but only parents can prevent them.
No reasonable parent wants his child to suffer a sexual
dysfunction. Yet it happens again and again. Parents avoid,
mildly discourage, or whitewash sex. The toddler sitting on
his potty chair, tweaking his penis, is given a toy "instead."
Other parts of the body have names, but the clitoris seems
not to exist.
The penis is for carrying urine, or for putting
seeds in Mommy's baby bag, but not for feeling good. A
happy, productive little girl shouldn't have time for masturbation.
And nobody ever says anything nice about Billy's
penis.
The child becomes acutely aware of the parent's embarrassment
and lack of enthusiasm about sex. Shame is a
wordless concept infused in the toddler.
By age four it is
obstinately fixed, to plague the adult with crippling anxiety
or pervasive apathy.
During the past hundred years, we have advanced from
clitoral cautery as a cure for self-abuse to studied indifference
to the child's eroticism. Clearly this is not enough.