Yates. Chapter 7. Enriching the Child's Sexual Response
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The recent liberalization of sexual attitudes didn't spring full-blown from the "in" generation. It arose from the toil of researchers and writers for over a century. Edward Brecher, in his book The Sex Researcher, has traced changes in attitudes about sex through the growth of the sex researchers themselves. The first of these, Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902), made an honest attempt to catalog and describe sexual aberrations. He mobilized his readers' terror and disgust by detailing the most horrifying cases of sadism in the history of criminal law and did much to further the rigid repression in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Psychopathia Sexualis stressed that the simplest acts between lovers were perilously close to perversion. An innocent kiss served as the precursor of a monstrous act. Perversions were the inevitable sequel to childhood masturbation. Guarding the child against self-abuse saved him from the insane asylum or the gallows, and protected future generations. Krafft-Ebing described one woman who began to masturbate as a child and continued in marriage even during her twelve pregnancies. Due to this, five of her children "died early, four were hydrocephalic and two of the boys began to masturbate." The fate of the twelfth child was not recorded.

It remained for Havelock Ellis and his contemporary, Sigmund Freud, to alter the cultural climate. Havelock Ellis was born in 1859 and died in 1939. His childhood was overwhelmingly Victorian. None of his four sisters ever married and Havelock himself remained a virgin until his marriage at thirty-two. He was exposed to all the antierotic horror stories with which Victorians stuffed the minds of their children at an impressionable age. Although his books never gained the preeminence and worldwide popularity of Krafft-Ebing's melodramatic work, he was the first to proclaim that masturbation is normal and perhaps a necessary part of healthy development in both boys and girls. He presented human sexuality in an altogether different context, as a pathway to joy and fulfillment. Several years in advance of Sigmund Freud he published a series of case histories which delineated the vast range of sexual experiences and interests among young children. He included not only those who were later identified as perverted or criminal, but also children who grew up to be happy and healthy pillars of society. He indicated that the early repression of sexuality in girls was a major factor in female frigidity. He anticipated Kinsey and Masters by describing male impotence and female frigidity as psychological in the overwhelming majority of cases.

His motivation to become a physician and to collect and publish his gargantuan eight volumes, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, stemmed from his own sexual problems. Instead of rationalizing or denying his partial impotence, he developed openness, which enabled him to accept homosexuality without prejudice, and to rework his own sexual conflicts. At the age of sixty, Havelock Ellis finally found full sexual potency with a young French woman who loved him. They lived together happily until his death at the age of eighty. He was the first to dispel the stereotypes of his time, emerging as the true father of the "sexual revolution."

Sigmund Freud also developed within the Victorian corset. Normal sexuality had been defined as the occasional insertion of a husband's penis within his wife's vagina in order to procreate — never recreate. Even Freud taught that masturbation sapped strength and produced a debilitating disease: "neurasthenia." He echoed Tissot, who had proclaimed a century before that the loss of one ounce of semen sapped as much strength as forty ounces of blood. Yet Freud was a liberal. He refused to resort to the accepted treatments for self-abuse, such as the application of a white-hot iron to the clitoris. Instead, he recommended persuasion and surveillance around the clock. He identified sexual deviants such as the exhibitionist and Peeping Tom as childlike rather than the carriers of a loathsome disease. He removed sexuality from the Calvinists' bailiwick of evil and stated simply that sex is a natural and necessary developmental force. He emphasized that children perceive eroticism differently from adults.

Freud provoked immediate furor in 1903 when he presented his treatise on infantile sexuality. The concepts that infants are erotic and that normal sexual development is essential for health shocked and angered Victorian Vienna. Freud was ridiculed and his theory soundly rejected.

Freud describes the child's sexual development in narrowly defined stages: oral, anal, genital, and latency. Although these concepts are laced with profound insight, they are also somewhat misleading. He assigned the mouth as the sexual organ of infancy and the anus as the sexual organ of the toddler. Genital sensations don't arise until about the fourth year, only to be submerged in "latency" a few years later. Genital pleasures are not experienced again until puberty. (Freud, 1953) We know now that any area of the body can become an erotic focus at any time. In "latency" there is a steady increase in sexual interest and activity. In spite of these discrepancies, Freud stands correct in his basic assumption: Sex begins in infancy.

Freud elucidates a number of defenses, techniques we use to avoid anxiety. An idea may be accepted intellectually while it remains rejected emotionally. We know that death is inevitable, but cannot really accept our own demise. We may say that sex is a healthy, normal function and yet feel uneasy with a child's erotic experiments. A mother who certainly wishes her little girl to become a sexually competent adult is "worried sick" when she discovers her five-year-old daughter poking at the family pooch to "make his wienie come out."

Freud was reared in the philosophy of "Kinder, Küche, und Kirche." After dinner, women were excluded as men retired together to the library for brandy, cigars, and good conversation. Freud proclaimed that "anatomy is destiny," and intimated that the clitoris was but a damaged penis. They were expected to stand in awe and envy as they viewed the magnificent male. Sexually inadequate, passive, and socially inferior, women possessed "the charm of a child." Irrational, emotional, and dependent, they could compensate in part by bagging a husband and bearing his child. Men, of course, were aggressive, analytical, independent, and confident. (Gould, 1975)

Today many women still feel inferior to men both in business and in bed. They accept lesser sexual pleasure much as they accept a lesser salary and more menial labor. Tasks such as changing smelly diapers or scrubbing floors remain "woman's work." But women, too, need to feel potent in order to seek, ask for, and occasionally insist on what they need in business or in bed. (Fischer, 1973) Building a sense of self-worth in sexually dysfunctional women is a goal at the sex clinic; building a sense of potency in young girls is a task for the parent.

At the age of sixty-nine, Freud finally accepted masturbation as not debilitating. Perhaps women seemed not quite as debilitated as they did during his youth. In his time Freud was both a prisoner and a revolutionary; Freud changed his culture, and the culture changed Freud.

Now clergymen receive training in sex counseling and there are sex therapists or clinics in every major city. Popular magazines carry material that would have been considered pornographic in Freud's era. Nude beaches and clinging T-shirts with sayings about oral sex are here. We teach sex in the grammar school and allow adolescents into drive-in theaters where the PG-rated show would have been rated triple-X just two decades ago. We wonder whether the male erection will persist in spite of women's liberation. Freud's theories no longer shock us, and yet, three quarters of a century later, we continue to avoid our children's sexuality.

Havelock Ellis faced rejection, Freud provoked ridicule, and in 1948 Alfred Kinsey met renewed furor with the first scientific attempt to define and study human sexuality. He included a study of childhood eroticism because he considered such a study essential to the understanding of the adult response.

He interviewed children as young as age two and found that many had learned about sex around the time they had begun to talk. He noted that girls were much more constricted and inexperienced than boys and related this to the extraordinary incidence of sex problems in women. Those few women who reported childhood masturbation reported a far higher rate of orgasm in marriage.

Kinsey dispelled a tenacious myth which Freud and many others had espoused. "Ladies" were assumed to possess at best an anemic, fragile response; Kinsey unequivocally demonstrated that women have the greater and more durable erotic potential.

In 1966, nearly twenty years after Kinsey began to publish, William Masters and Virginia Johnson demolished another, seemingly impenetrable, barrier. In the scientific laboratory, they observed and recorded approximately 14,000 sex acts and studied the humans who could or could not function. Masters and Johnson came to recognize the immense importance of childhood influences. In Human Sexual Response, they state: "Neither this book nor this chapter can be complete without emphasizing an acute awareness of the vital, certainly the primary influence, exerted by early psychosocial factors upon human sexuality, particularly that of orgasmic attainment of the female."

Following Masters and Johnson's revelations, a number of prominent psychiatrists examined and elaborated on their basic postulates. One well-recognized expert is Helen Singer Kaplan, M.D., author of The New Sex Therapy. On the basis of her work with countless clients, she describes our society as sexually confused and constricted. She states: "Conflicts between sexual wishes and fears of retaliation from gods, society and parents are ubiquitous and perhaps unavoidable to some extent in our society with our current child-rearing practices...every manifestation of a person's craving for sexual pleasure is apt to be denied, ignored or treated as a shameful thing, and in general relentlessly assaulted with painful associations and consequences, especially during the critical childhood years." It is the very intensity of the sex drive that creates its vulnerability. It can be distorted, constricted, dehumanized, and even entirely eliminated by early, severe trauma. "This phenomenon is well known to the horse breeder who carefully pads the breeding stall, lest his expensive stud injure himself during coitus and thus refuse to mate thereafter."

Kaplan and others delineate a series of problems that produce sexual impairments. Fear of failure is a frequent cause. This arises from ignorance, misinformation, and trauma. One or both partners are too ashamed or frightened to ask for what feels good. The couple forgoes stimulating investigations for the safety of a routine as familiar as emptying the trash. Women especially may limit sex to "when he wants it." Passively, they accept whatever they happen to get, assuming that mutual pleasure is unattainable or unimportant. Some fear exposure more than failure. "I'd look stupid if I did that" is a common complaint. Women who feel dumpy hide in flannel nightgowns and fake a climax. Men feign indifference when their erections falter.

Performance anxiety is the bane of the male who is overly concerned with pleasing his partner — he assumes total responsibility for her orgasm. If she fails, so must he. He must become erect immediately, use the right foreplay, and continue thrusting until her climax. Making love is a contest where he must measure up or flunk. A single soft erection becomes a catastrophe.

All these problems are perpetuated by the couple's inability to share their concerns or devise realistic strategies together. Hampered by shame and disappointment, they may find it easier to abandon lovemaking. Some may listlessly follow the same old recipe even though the result remains tasteless. Yet erotic impediments are not "just human nature." The sex clinics clearly indicate that sexual attitudes and behaviors are learned. Adult dysfunctions result from having understood the body or its function as bad, shameful, or dirty as a child.

If adult problems stem from faulty learning, then the solution is to relearn healthier perceptions and behaviors, perhaps through a series of remedial exercises. Sex therapy clinics do exactly that. Couples are successfully treated without lengthy psychotherapy by undertaking and discussing simple erotic tasks — simple enough to be called "childish." The most basic assignment consists of nongenital touch, or mutual pleasuring. The couple snuggle, rub, fondle, and lick to recapture the springtime of their pleasure.

The touch, smell, and taste of the partner are vital once more. Spirited tussles and frivolous giggles result. Erections are magically resurrected and tissues are once again moist and glistening, ready for the next exercise. More advanced tasks are more difficult; they provoke anxiety and shame. Each partner must stand naked before a triple mirror and beneath a bright light. Each anatomical feature is touched and described. Each must masturbate before the other. Each must relate his or her most intimate fantasy in lavish detail. Roleplaying an orgasm, quiet containment of the penis in the vagina, reading erotic books together, and using slang sex words to increase excitement may be other assignments. As these tasks are successfully completed, the couple builds confidence and is better able to communicate. Erotic enrichment and the relief of anxiety are happy by-products.

Our more fortunate children are astutely completing the same tasks, and many more — beneath the porch, behind the bush, and up in the tree house. Our children can treat themselves, if only we will allow it.

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