Our culture believes strongly that exposing children to any expressions of sexuality, such as pictures or words, will harm them, even when the activity being depicted is not itself harmful. Many people believe, for example, that a child will be hurt by seeing a photo of a couple making love, even though the lovemaking itself is in no way harmful.
There is no other harmless activity that children (or adults) are similarly barred from seeing or hearing about. In no other arena does our society fear that depictions of activities are in themselves harmful. On the contrary, our society even allows children to see depictions of activities that are harmful to those involved. The average US child, for example, witnesses one hundred murders every month on TV. That’s called family entertainment.
One consequence of the cultural belief that children must be protected from sex is that children are denied important sexual information. This systemic and culturally conditioned ignorance is probably the single biggest influence shaping childhood development. This willful ignorance makes normal sexual events such as the onset of menstruation, wet dreams, the desire to masturbate, and the unintentional observation of sexual activity terrifying to children.
Withholding sexual knowledge is a deliberate engineering of early childhood sexual experiences to make them forbidding, scary, disgusting, guilt-ridden – in other words, anti-erotic. I know some of you reading this may be saying, “Not me!” but this is how an anti-erotic culture instills its values to successive generations.
Sexual ignorance is then reinforced by culturally generated disinformation. Distorted beliefs about masturbation, “nice” girls, fertility, “performance,” female orgasm, and homosexuality alienate us from our bodies, from the other gender (tell me this last one isn’t so!), and from our own desires. Your little girl, as of the end of today, will have literally received dozens of negative and unhealthy messages about her body, for example.
Society maintains sexual ignorance through designated gatekeepers of sexual information. The people who often teach sexual values in our culture are anti-sexual and often have a subversive political agenda for manipulating sexual thought and behavior. For example, while for a long time people were (and still are) directed to their physicians for sexual questions, sexuality is typically excluded from most U.S. medical training. In any case, people most often “learn” about sex from their peers, those often least qualified to do so.
Most authority figures imbued with the legitimacy to educate about sex are similarly ignorant and untrained: TV talk show hosts who are uncomfortable with sex and are primarily interested the sexual extremes and distortions that increase ratings; clergy who are afraid of sex, often sexually abstinent themselves, and more committed to limited sexual choices such as monogamy and reproductive sex (what some youth I know call “breeders”); journalists who are superficial, limited to “family language,” and committed to narrow definitions of sexual normalcy; parents who are uncomfortable about sex and convinced that good parenting means protecting their children from sexual stimuli; mental health professionals whose training often includes only “abnormal” sexuality, and whose agenda regarding sex is generally to help people adjust and conform to anti-sexual societal norms.
As I have been attempting to articulate in the past, learning to doubt our sexual normalcy is key in internalizing societal sexual repression. Since real sex is neither honestly discussed nor observed, no one really knows what others feel and do. No matter what you say children grow up in families with sexual secrets, where it is impossible to feel secure with one’s sexual thoughts and feelings. And even in the rare cases where children are raised in sex-affirmitive households, there is still the issue of having to be raised within the larger family – our society, which repudiate anything and everything you have taught your dear child.
Advertiser’s, in their mad dash for the Almighty Dollar, continuously encourage customers to question their sexuality (of course, they’re always ready to fix the resulting insecurities by selling a product *wink*). More money is to be made from the various institutions set up to define and repair what becomes considered as abnormal sexuality.
Frigid women? Erectile “dysfunction”? “You’re too fuckin fat!” “You’re not pretty!” “You’re not manly”
Creating anxiety about what constitutes “normal” is a form of social control. The power to decide who is sexually normal is the power to validate and invalidate in a powerfully basic way. Fears about not being normal keep us from expressing our eroticism freely and joyously. In trying to be come normal, instead of trying to discover who we are, we act out our anxieties both sexually and non-sexually.
In this way, American culture frightens teenage boys about not being sufficiently masculine. As a result, adolescent boys project their anxiety by running around deriding each other as fags. Of course, these boys then deny and repress any erotic impulse that could possibly be considered homosexual, such as tenderness, surrender, nurturance, or any other feeling of real emotional warmth toward other males. Believe me, almost all my male friends hate it that I hug and kiss them on the cheek when I greet them. Some will threaten me with physical violence if I do that “faggot shit.” It’s hilarious! Boys learn that sexuality is about proving you’re a man. How can a boy (and many men) be anything but intensely homophobic?
Yes, even your boy…
Our culture reduces feelings of gender adequacy to a reward if we perform well, like a circus animal and that’s tragic. How frightening it is to have something that should be a birthright transformed by society to something we have to earn repeatedly. With so much at stake, it’s no wonder that sex oftentimes feels like life and death. This makes sex outcome-oriented – an irony since sex is one the most process oriented activities of life.
In our culture we’re invested on the aspects of sexual expression that’s easily measurable, such as erection and orgasm. Aspects of sex that are more ambiguous such as sensuality, powerplay, or intimacy, are seen as less important and certainly less interesting.
Another way we are taught to distrust sexuality is through the fear that our sexual feelings will get out of control. Children of both genders, for example, are taught that boys cannot be trusted to control their sexual impulses. We learn that masturbation is bad, and then feel in danger of losing control when our bodies yearn for that forbidden touch. We learn that not only sexual behavior, but sexual thoughts and feelings are bad, and we are painfully aware of the conflict in having to constantly sanitize our sexual desires and fantasies.
It’s a culture that at once fears and magnifies sexuality, we all feel terribly vulnerable to the temptation of the sexually forbidden. Religious attitudes that link eroticism to lust encourage us to think of sexual desire as a process that sabotages responsible decision-making. We’re taught that if our sexuality gets out of control we are likely to damage ourselves, our loved ones, innocent people, even our communities We will offend God! We will be permanently stained. Our erotic baggage is that we have to spend every minute of our lives repressing sexuality in all its guises. In this way, sex becomes the most powerful, the most evil force on earth.
How can we overcome society’s irrational fear of sexuality and encourage proper respect for both sex and eroticism? This is a complex question, but in the midst of all the hand-wringing, there are certainly some clear paths that beg to be explored. As in all solutions, we first have to recognize the problem. We must stop denying the existence and validity of childhood sexuality, first of all. In addition we need to recognize that pleasure is a need and a right, not a privilege or a luxury, and recognize that eroticism can be expressed in many ways without causing problems of any kind. Most importantly, we need to challenge the concept of normal sex.
As a society (and not merely as individuals, for this is a societal problem), we need to recognize the devastating consequences of the suppression of sexuality, including violence, relationship dysfunction, and poor health. We desperately need to help people, especially our children, understand that anxiety about sexuality is normal, it doesn’t mean they are inadequate. we need to confront and resolve our negative feelings about the body; expand the fuckin’ social definition of sexy so that it is more inclusive (real women have curves?) Most of all we need to see more clearly the link between anti-eroticism and consumerism; this ridiculous belief that the way to enjoy sex is to acquire and consume rather than simply be who you are.
On a policy level, we need to take sex education in schools a lot more seriously, as both preparation for adulthood and healthy decision-making; make accurate information about all aspects of sexuality easily available to adults, adolescents, and interested children; and challenge the social policies that are anti-sexual. We must change the language of the debate to uncover the various ways anti sex values seep into the collective consciousness, such as pro-lifeanti smut (anti-sexual), and we must educate leaders on all these issues, including medical students, journalists, clergy, and mental health professionals. (anti choice) and
I will say that the fear of sexuality is so deeply embedded by custom and tradition in our collective psyche that we have come to think fear is a necessary part of sex. This is bullshit. In fact, eroticism can, by its very nature, transform us precisely because it can provide us with the direct experience of fearlessness. Fear of Eros is not a natural law. It is the result of cultural, social, and political forces, and it is championed by those who benefit most from it.
For centuries the erotic impulse has been feared as a fundamental problem. It is time we come to recognize it is a fundamental solution.
