<< Allow a Child to Become Acquainted >>
(by Money, John and Patricia Tucker. Sexual Signatures: What it Means to be a Man or a Woman)

“Living in the modern world, clothed and muffled,” Margaret Mead (1949) gently pointed out, “it is easy to lose sight of the immediacy of the human body plan. The little boy needs to see the changes in body form and hair, the gradually developing genitals, the spreading hair on chest and armpits, the first soft facial down that no razor will recognize, to bind his sense of himself, still so small and undeveloped, to the man that he will become. And the little girl, to be equally assured, needs to be one of a series of girls, up through the nubile girl with budding breasts to the mature young woman, and finally to the just pregnant, the fully pregnant and the post-parturient and suckling mother. This is what happens in those primitive societies in which the body is hardly covered at all and most of the bodily changes are present to the child’s eye. . . . The worried and frightened comparison between the small boy and his father — the only exhibit of maleness that is vouchsafed to him in our society — are not the characteristic features of such an experience. This is not to say that we should go all the way back to nature, but that occasional exposure to parental nudity and a high school course in sex education are not enough.”

Our society has made progress since Mead’s words were written in 1949. Summer fashions and beachwear have approached the limits of nudity, advanced pregnancy no longer impels a woman to stay out of the public eye, and a nursing mother need no longer retire to the bedroom to feed her baby.

The “unisex” fashions in clothes and social behavior adopted by youth in the past few years might look like a step in the wrong direction, but they can also be seen as a healthy move to tie gender differences more firmly to the basic differences in anatomy rather than to conventional differences in the cut of clothes and hair. The facts that long-haired boys usually sport moustaches, beards, or sideburns and that most jeans-clad girls spurn brassieres and girdles support this view.. The children of the "unisex” generation already show signs of being more relaxed about the superficial differences in gender roles than even their young parents.

Nevertheless there are surprisingly many American children today who literally do not know the genital difference between males and females, others who have a great store of misinformation about reproduction to confuse them, and still others who know enough but are so inhibited that they can’t talk about it, a milder form of the selective mutism on the subject of sex that afflicted a hermaphrodite child who was raised as a heterosexually oriented girl and later “told at the age of 12 that she is really a boy” with testes and a penis. So painful has the thought of his mixed-up sex become to him that a child is able to say a word about even such peripherally related topics as clothes. “... we try to change her into a boy. We then find that she is unable to will away her formerly heterosexual orientation which now, by the surgeon’s knife and by fiat, makes her into a homosexual. How moral is such morality?” (Robert Stoller, 1968)

Small wonder that many American children today grow up clinging desperately to the superficial sex differences, for one must have something to cling to, if it’s only that “men are helpless in the kitchen,” or “women can’t drive a nail in straight.” Children whose gender schemas are built around the sturdy framework of accurate information about the genital sex differences and their uses can afford more freedom in pursuing their individual bents, and later they can wash dishes or shovel coal, tend children or run for public office, without straining their confidence in themselves as masculine or feminine.

Ideally, parents will unostentatiously allow their children to become acquainted, from infancy on, with the nude appearance of family members, juvenile and adult, in the normal course of dressing, undressing and bathing. Ideally, also, they will acquaint their children from an early age, step by step, with information about where babies come from, and how; they will not be evasive about the function of the penis and vagina in intercourse.

Lack of a simple, untarnished terminology handicaps those who want to be honest with young children about sexual intercourse. The English language has been robbed of the simple, graphic sex words. They’ve been banned, then sneaked back into common currency as insults and badges of defiance. When overuse wears away these counterfeit meanings, perhaps they can again serve at face value. Meanwhile, instead of straightforward words like “dick,” “cunt” and “fuck,” there is only a choice between fuzzy euphemisms such as “private parts” and “making love,” or clinical terms such as “penis,” “vagina” and “copulation,” or pomposities such as “male member,” “female organs,” and “sexual relations.” Even in kindergarten, however, a child can understand a story that tells of the swimming race of the sperm, competing for the prize of joining with the egg to start a baby growing — 300 million of them and only one winner. The sperm are pumped out of the penis, the story can explain, and to give them a fair chance at the start of the race, the penis fits into the baby tunnel or birth canal — the vagina — in much the same way as a thumb fits into your mouth, if you suck your thumb. Moreover, it feels good and comforting when two parts of the body are fitted together like that just as a thumb feels comforting to a thumb-sucker, but it is much more exciting than sucking your thumb.

Parents who are at ease with their own sexuality and really enjoy their sex lives are good at being able to recognize their children’s sexual curiosity and to provide information in appropriate installments. These parents do not wait for their children’s questions in order to answer them honestly, for they know that waiting makes it already too late. Children learn the taboo on sexuality in our society all too soon, and it freezes up their natural inquiries. Parents should be the ones who break the ice.

Parents who are at ease with their own sexuality make the sharing of sexual knowledge always so open within the family that they don’t need to prepare a biological lecture for a mother-to-daughter or father-to-son talk on the eve of puberty. The timing of such a talk is too late, and its aim is too narrow, even if a parent is able to deliver it free from distorting embarrassment. Moreover, such talks, like most formal sex education courses (in schools that offer them), are almost invariably limited to the mechanics of reproduction. Useful as information about reproductive processes may be, it is not by itself an adequate foundation for full sexual development. To deal with reproduction and leave out sensuality, eroticism, and love is little help to a preadolescent child who is trying to find out what sex is all about. Human sexuality involves all the senses — touch, taste, sight, smell, and hearing — and the most ecstatic reaches of emotion and sensation. To give the reproductive facts but leave out these elements is to falsify an otherwise accurate recital. This falsification helps to sustain an idiotic but disastrous dichotomy between love and lust, between romance, falling in love, tenderness and devotion on one side, and anything to do with sex organs on the other. “Don’t touch your genitals, they’re dirty, so save them for the one you’re going to love,” but “love is so pure, the one you love so sacred, that to even think of using your sex organs with him or her befouls the relationship.”

The taboo on sexual terminology has as its counterpart the taboo on pictorial representations of sex. In the mass media, our children have ample access to sex models with the secondary sex characteristics grossly exaggerated, but seldom to honest portrayals of naked human bodies and virtually never to frank depictions of copulation or birth. Children can see people quarreling, fighting, and killing each other, often in ghastly and ingenious ways, even in the television shows and comic strips designed for children. But sexual intercourse? Never. It might, society fears, incite them to go out and do — who knows what? “Monkey see, monkey do” is the false proverbial philosophy that society uses to justify its taboo on sexual pictures. In point of fact, children don’t automatically copy everything they see. Consider, for example, that millions of children over hundreds of years have been given detailed, illustrated lessons on crucifixion. Have you ever heard of children rushing home from Sunday school to play crucifixion games? The point is, of course, that the Crucifixion of Christ is presented to children in a moral context. Along with the technique, they learn the moral significance of what happened on that Friday, and even very young children are adept at absorbing moral precepts that are presented to them in a proper context. When it comes to presenting human sexuality, however, our society is hopelessly confused about what the proper moral context is.

The same principles apply to the use of explicit sexual pictures. They can and should be used as part of a child’s sex education, but where can parents and teachers find suitable pictures? The sophisticated drawings in a book like Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex (1972) are much too elaborate and fanciful to be useful as a primer, and straightforward photographs are not easy to find. For example, some of the best photographs we’ve seen are badly reproduced on cheap paper in The Pictorial Guide to Sexual Intercourse by Schwenda and Leuchner (1969), which is available (if it still is) only in some of the unsavory “adult” bookshops.

The best time to introduce such pictures is before a child’s biological clock has signaled the start of puberty. Prepubertal children are intellectually capable of understanding sex, and their curiosity about life runs high. They will no doubt find these pictures erotically stimulating, but as the novelty wears off they will soon settle down and accept the information in the matter-of-fact way they accept information about other facets of adult life. If their first exposure to pictures of sexual relations between men and women comes after hormonal puberty has begun, the education will still be helpful but their erotic response will be harder for them to manage and they will need more exposure before the pictures cease to arouse it. In short, it takes older children longer to grow bored with such pictures.

A more complicated situation arises when a child happens to observe an adult couple engaged in sexual intercourse. Copulatory privacy is so embedded in our society’s sexual taboo that the idea of learning about sexual intercourse by seeing it in real life shocks most people. The fact is, however, that millions of the world’s children grow up to be quite normal sexually in families whose members all sleep together in the same living space with sexual intercourse an open secret if it is a secret at all. Sexual intercourse can safely be explained to our children as a game grown-ups play. With a little calm guidance, the experience can be integrated into the child’s sex education and serve to reinforce his or her own gender identity/role. But when adults panic, the experience becomes traumatic for all concerned. Even with wise guidance, however, children in a society that cherishes coital privacy must pay a penalty for witnessing sexual intercourse since they must then be burdened with either keeping the experience a secret or being labeled “bad” by less enlightened playmates and their families and possibly by their teachers as well, if they talk about it.

The sexual organs themselves are active from birth. Some normal girl babies have a slight amount of menstrual bleeding for a day or two after they are separated from their mother’s hormones, and boy babies get penile erections, sometimes on the day they’re born. Babies of both sexes have been known to exercise their bodies and genitals rhythmically so as to achieve spasmodic muscular reactions that resemble sexual climax, and in some cultures it’s customary to stroke an infant’s genitals as a way of soothing distress or lulling the baby to sleep. Evidence that babies normally experience something very like the pleasure and comfort adults derive from sex is not hard to find. In a social and geographic climate that permits children to go naked, you often see nursing children quite ingenuously and almost absentmindedly fondle their genitals, and the little boys get an erection.

It need hardly be said that punishment for these kinds of activities has a devastating effect on a child’s self-image, developing concepts of sensuality, and feelings about close body contact. The baby’s psychosexual normalcy depends on the good feeling of joy and security in hugging, cuddling, fondling and skin contact, especially when being fed. Early theorists of child development failed to appreciate the importance of body contact and infantile clinging to normal gender identity differentiation in human beings, and to their psychosexual development in general. The suspicion that these are essential was aroused by studies of children raised in foundling homes where they had been shortchanged in human contact and clinging. Studies of monkeys reared in isolation have brought home the full significance. Year by year, monkey studies have been building up the evidence, and there is now no longer any question that unless a monkey has a mother to cling to in infancy and agemates to play with in early childhood, it cannot copulate normally and reproduce when it grows up.

Monkeys play sexual games with their playmates, rehearsing the crouching, mounting, and thrusting that will later be used in sexual intercourse. They also play at masturbation, and masturbation too is a normal part of human infancy and childhood. In fact all of the sensory and motoric part-functions of lovemaking and sex are intact from early childhood, and if they are eventually to be coordinated and patterned into a functional whole, the child needs a chance to exercise them, just as in other types of development. Newborns, for example, have legs and can make treading motions with them, although it will be some time before they can walk, and babies vocalize long before they can talk. Parents and siblings constantly serve as models for the baby to show how it’s done. The baby’s treading and vocalizing elicit delighted encouragement, which helps the child learn, and take pleasure and pride in learning, to walk and talk. But in our society, experiments with sexual part-functions are firmly discouraged, and any model of how the part-functions will eventually fit together in copulatory behavior patterns is top secret. Imagine the handicap of trying to learn to walk or talk under such conditions.

A baby boy needs help and reassurance in identifying himself as a boy who will grow up to be a man and help in learning how to do it. He needs to know that his penis is a proud, integral part of what makes him a boy, a promise of his future manhood, and he needs a concept of how he will use his penis to validate his manhood. It’s easy for a mother who may adore her baby but despise her husband and his penis to communicate to her infant son in subtle, covert ways a conviction that he would be even more adorable if it weren’t for that rather disgusting little appendage on his belly. Anxiously the baby, whose life is so literally in her hands, must seek to wish away the offending member. If such messages are compelling enough in infancy, and are not countered by his father, the baby can be led to reject his penis and his masculinity altogether, heading toward transexualism.

A baby girl needs help and reassurance in identifying herself as a girl who will grow up to be a woman and help in learning how to do it. She needs to know that her vulva is a proud, integral part of what makes her a girl, a promise of her future womanhood, and she needs a concept of how her vagina and the hidden “baby nest” above it will validate her womanhood. It’s easy for parents and others to convey in subtle ways the message that there’s something vaguely disgusting about a vagina and menstruation; in fact, such messages are built into many cultures and are anything but subtle. The fact that it’s women who give birth to all babies, male and female, makes it harder to deflect a girl into differentiating a male gender identity, but it can be done. A parent who wants to use a daughter as a substitute for a wished-for son can, without admitting it even to himself or herself, let the baby girl know unmistakably that the way to the parental love on which her life depends is for her to code her male schema positive. If such messages are compelling enough and are not countered, she can be led to reject her femininity and head for transexualism.

All children need to understand conception and the birth process, particularly the function of the girl’s vagina as a “baby canal.” If they do not, sooner or later they will have to devise for themselves some explanation of how babies start and how they are delivered. The fanciful conclusions they are likely to reach on their own may be highly entertaining to adults, but can easily distort a child’s future sex life. And it is especially important that both boys and girls appreciate the simple fact that conception is a cooperative venture. If a little boy says, as a two-year-old who had watched with fascination the pregnancy of a neighbor and the subsequent arrival of a baby recently did, “I’ve got babies in my tummy,” he ventures the statement tentatively and looks to his parents for confirmation. The answer, “No, darling, babies only grow in a mommy’s tummy,” is honest, but robs the little boy of his rightful sense of participation in this vital process. People almost invariably describe conception as sperm swimming up to fertilize the egg, but in truth it is equally accurate to say that the egg comes down to meet and fertilize the sperm. The answer, “No, darling, not in your tummy, you have babies in your testicles but they grow only in a mommy’s tummy,” gives the little boy what he is seeking — accurate knowledge of his own future part in creating babies.

Once gender identity differentiates as male or female, one schema is coded positive, the other negative. Confusion thereafter doesn’t change this but may affect the sorting of behavior into the two schemas. The sorting process is not very well understood, but it is where some types of homosexuality originate. When a child is old enough to ask questions about sexual behavior, what he or she wants to know is how, when, where, and with whom sex should be explored, and how to behave in matters of peer group curiosity. What a child usually gets may be a spanking, a frown, a blank look, an evasive answer, a biological lecture, or at best a message that adds up to “It’s so wonderful you shouldn’t have anything to do with it.” Such responses quickly teach the child not to expect any useful guidance. While the fact of child sexuality has long since been established, neither the fact nor its significance as a basis of adult sexuality has yet had much impact on social conventions.

Prohibiting sex play doesn’t stop it, but does drive it underground, leaving children to grope at each other guiltily in the dark. Prohibiting sex play also leaves parents in the dark about their children’s sexual development. Since the mistakes that are made don’t usually show up clearly until puberty, and since by then it’s hard to trace the errors back to their source in childhood, little has been learned about how to diagnose these problems while there is still time to correct them. To perpetuate this dangerous situation, scientific investigation is also prohibited on the rationale that to study children’s sexuality would violate the age of innocence and also, quite paradoxically, that it would stir up in the children the lurking demon of original sin. Scientists who propose such studies are more likely to be threatened with prosecution than funded, so that to date childhood sexuality remains the arcane subject of unconfirmed doctrine, projection and conjecture, while children and those responsible for their welfare are preserved not in innocence but in ignorance.

The fact that there are cultures which encourage children’s interest in their genitals and their rehearsals of copulatory behavior, and that these cultures seem to be remarkably free of impotence and other psychosexual disorders that plague our own society, strongly suggests that there are better ways of managing childhood sexuality than trying to squelch it. Their ways may not be ours, but we’re hardly likely to find better ways for ourselves by refusing to look for them.

When it comes to the erotic functioning of the most potent of the human sex organs, the brain, our society today leaves education to disk jockeys, poets, novelists, dramatists, folk singers, and the franker autobiographers who, if they get too explicit, are censored. The business of erotic and sexual censorship is so enmeshed in conflicting paradoxes that it confuses the best judicial minds in the land, not to mention the minds of children, adolescents, and parents. Attempts to define obscenity and pornography are often ludicrous.

Somehow in the course of history we have managed to define as obscene the nude human body and the way it is reproduced. When the legal restrictions on portrayal of nudity were eased recently, the compromise arrived at by a United States court was pathetic. The majesty of the law decreed that in this greatest, most powerful country on earth, a naked man and woman together may be publicly portrayed only if the man’s penis is flaccid and impotent!

As to what constitutes pornography, the high courts have painted themselves into an odd corner by defining it as that which appeals to prurient interest. Since prurient means itchy, and an interest in sex is perfectly normal, that definition is no help. The itchiness comes not from what you see but from the sense of wrongdoing you get from taking a sneaky peek at what you’ve been indoctrinated to believe you shouldn’t look at. There won’t be any sensible answers until the courts and the public accept a more realistic view of what pornography can and cannot do. Pornography will not turn a child into a sex degenerate, a sex maniac, or even a picture freak, nor does pornography broaden the appetites of a deviant at any age. Vendors of pornography know very well that their financial success depends on catering to the established tastes of their regular customers. The people who keep the porn shops in business don’t browse around; they come in for their own kind of thing and they don’t want any other kind. The tourist trade is fly-by-night and soon exhausts itself.

Honest pornography might, however, help to prevent twists in sexual development. When Denmark lifted all legal restrictions on pornography in 1969, the upsurge in sex crimes which many had confidently predicted failed to materialize. In fact, Denmark’s sex crime rate plummeted. Most notable was a prompt and sharp decline in the incidence of child molestation. No doubt there are better ways than pornography to satisfy the itch of normal curiosity about sex, but leaving children in a morass of ignorance about a significant aspect of their being is hardly one of them, nor is it any help to them in sorting out gender behavior. Consider the pathology you would have to expect in a society that prescribed secret eating, banned cookbooks and pictures of food, and pretended that children never eat at all.

Instead of wringing hands over the incidence of sexual deviation and sex crimes, our society would do better to support research on how sexuality develops. If we knew more about how sexuality normally evolves, and if our children were encouraged to be open and inquiring instead of secretive about their sexual feelings, discrepancies could be identified and often corrected before they could do any permanent harm. As it is, we routinely check children’s height, weight, posture, physical coordination, eyesight, and so forth, but we have no way of checking on their erotic development. We wouldn’t know what to look for if we did, and have only a pitifully limited knowledge of corrective measures to apply when we suspect things are going awry.

Provided you were lucky and nothing went awry, you emerged from infancy with a sense of goodness in body contact as a foundation for genuinely erotic experience later, and for a masculine or feminine differentiation of gender identity/role. Identification and complementation both fell into place as you differentiated your two sex schemas, and you grew secure in yourself and secure in your sexual anatomy.

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