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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

Seeing more and more articles like this about paedophiles.

133 replies

Miffer · 11/09/2017 08:15

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-41213657

This is the first mainstream UK one I have come across but there have been a few US ones.

I am not okay with it. If you fancy kids it's not okay, it should not be accepted, it should be shunned, you shouldn't be able to talk about it, your friends should disown you, you shouldn't be able to Google this without ramifications.

From a utilitarian POV I think it's bullshit anyway. The few paedophiles that would commit less harm from support and a more accepting society will be vastly outnumbered by the harm caused by a more permissive attitude towards this.

OP posts:
SummerflowerXx · 17/09/2017 19:33

I guess the question would be also what researchers say today, as Freud is certainly not without controversy.

Gentlemanjohn · 17/09/2017 22:44

Thanks for your reply too.

Freud is not without controversy, but I would still argue, controversially, that he is broadly right.

Or that the fifty year old is doing anything other than a crime if he responds to a two year old's incidental curiousity about adult genitals by touching back, for example.

My point is that such an act is a heinous crime precisely because the child is a sexual subject. If you think about it, if children were asexual then any interference with them wouldn't be a problem: it wouldn't even register. We know that a lot of abuse survivors say that the most traumatising part of their experience was that they experienced pleasure. This is where the terrible burden of guilt that they carry to their graves comes from. 'I enjoyed this, so it must be my fault'. So far from legitimising child-adult sexual contact, the fact of child sexuality is precisely the reason why paedophiliac abuse is so horrifically damaging and morally outrageous. Because even though the child is a sexual subject of sorts, it has yet to develop the emotional understanding and sense of autonomy required to enter into sexual relations with an adult. Children are sexual beings, but at a different stage in sexual development to adults. Therefore, any sexual interference with them from adults will potentially impair their developmental journey into their own adulthood. They're not equipped for it, and if the abuser is a parent then that's even worse, because they will have enormous difficult establishing an identity separate from the abuser.

But about child sexuality, I think it's a very weird thing, because it doesn't serve any biological purpose, but neither is it part of adult sexual culture (and rightly so). So it's this strange, almost uncanny thing. I remember writing a psychology paper years ago on the representation of children in popular culture; how they're usually either asexual innocents or almost demonic figures as expressed in the 'devil child' horror genre (The Omen, The Exorcist, Midwich Cuckoos etc). Never anything in between. And I think that suggests child sexuality is a very perturbing idea that we almost don't know what to do with.

So I agree that it is different to adult sexuality, but at the same time children are people in process as it were. Freud's argument that a small child's erotic life is not yet genital, but it does have an erotic life from a very early. It gains oral pleasure from breastfeeding and anal pleasure from excretion, and although it will mature into a more genitally focused, adult sexuality, the 'erotogenic' zones of the mouth and the anus continue to play a big part in adult sexuality. Numerous fetishes bear Freud's theory out. There are people who get off on being breast fed, wearing nappies, excretion and urination, being mothered, being told off for being a 'naughty boy', women smoking cigarettes etc etc. And an 'anal fixation' is almost the norm now if you go by contemporary porn culture! So it's not like adult and child sexuality are completely distinct. It's more that they exist at completely different levels of psychic development,

Gentlemanjohn · 17/09/2017 22:46

Typo

Meant to say 'Freud's argument is that a small child's erotic life is not yet genital, but it does have an erotic life from a very early age.

SummerflowerXx · 18/09/2017 06:55

That is really interesting. I don't think we are arguing different things, although I would need to say current trends in pornography are extremely damaging, in my opinion, for young women, and the kind of excrement fantasies you describe are surely some kind of philia, rather than developmentally normal. I think I am saying that the ends/parts of the continuum are different and have different social and personal meanings.

However, the quote by JWreck that 'the child is a sexual being' is open to exploitation by those who would seek to justify their own perversion. Children are not sexual beings in the adult sense, it is a development, like everything else. It is also, as you say, a private development.

I am not sure society is perturbed by a child taking pleasure in its body and bodily functions, which is really what you are describing. Parents usually just teach accepted social norms. The disturbance comes in the associations of calling it 'childhood sexuality' and the concept it implies in relation to broader understandings of sexuality, and the fact the concept is open to abuse.

So I think, as adults, we do have a responsibility with the language we use and what we mean. The emphasise of infantile/childhood sexuality should be on the infantile/childhood, not the sexuality. It is about the boundaries we, as adults, put around it and maintain, to protect children from exploitation. There are always going to be people who take the headline statement 'children are sexual beings' and go with that, without considering the meaning and historical specificity of what Freud and his peers intended by that. Thus, it is not necessarily a safe statement, regardless of how it was originally intended or the wider nuances. Children are not sexual beings in the narrower adult understanding of a sexual being. It is not sexuality in the narrower adult understanding of sexuality.

I am wondering why movements advocating liberal attitudes towards child-adult relations come about at particular points in time. Because even when Freud was writing there were scandals about child abuse; it raised its head again in the 1970s, and if you go with the OP, there are discussions again now. But abuse hasn't gone away in that time.

Sorry, I am just reading your post again, I want to come back to the point about biological function - breastfeeding and evacuation do serve biological functions - the first keeps the infant fed and secure and the second is needed for healthy digestion. Otherwise, there would be abdominal discomfort. It is a necessary biological function, so maybe better for a baby to find it pleasurable to get rid of its poo!

SummerflowerXx · 18/09/2017 06:57

Lots of typos and meandering in my post! I am not sure I have collected my thoughts properly, rather am just exploring them.

Gentlemanjohn · 18/09/2017 08:23

I agree with the majority of what you say. In particular your point that The emphasise of infantile/childhood sexuality should be on the infantile/childhood, not the sexuality. It is about the boundaries we, as adults, put around it and maintain, to protect children from exploitation...which was my point too, though you made it much more concisely and articulately.

That is really interesting. I don't think we are arguing different things, although I would need to say current trends in pornography are extremely damaging, in my opinion, for young women, and the kind of excrement fantasies you describe are surely some kind of philia,

Of course they are damaging - there is a whole political argument to be had about porn; and there is an argument about where the boundaries between socially healthy and paraphiliac sexuality should lie. But Freud I think would be uneasy with the concept of normality as an organising principle. We know from the work of sexologists and sexual theorists - even feminist theorists like Nancy Friday - that most people have sexual fantasies which are outside the norm. In fact, Freud would say all sexuality is a perversion in that it is a deviation, a swerving away if you will, from original infantile complexes. In fact, it is the 'normal' sexuality that is the perversion. But Freud was also a moral and political conservative who believed civilisation depended on the repression of taboo wishes. In 'Civilisation and its Discontents' he argues that outbreaks of mass barbarism occur when civilisation's repressive mechanisms break down. So he was very much against freeing people from repression per se. Perhaps with porn what we are seeing is the results of those mechanisms being removed on a mass scale, and all of human culture's infantile sexual drives finding expression? Contrary to popular belief, he would see this as an unhealthy thing I think.

As for the necessity of excretory functions and breast feeding, absolutely. Freud's point was that human sexuality develops from our most basis needs. For example, when a child is toilet trained and finds they can withhold or expel excreta at will, and that this is a pleasurable sensation, then they become for the first time an embodied autonomous subject that can control their own pleasure. For Freud this was a sexually developmental stage.

You're absolutely right that the concept of child sexuality is open to abuse. In the 1970's there were circles of people on the radical left who believed we would only be free of bourgeois, capitalist morality once all sexual taboos were smashed. These were people - including some feminists - saying that society wouldn't be free until parents could have sex with their children and people could have sex with animals and all sorts. This was an actual conversation that was happening, believe it or not. All these paedophile liberation groups were founded that were seen as cranks but received nowhere near the opprobrium they would today. I mean can you imagine? It wasn't until a lot of the big abuse scandals broke the 80's and 90's that they truly fell out of favour.

Still, you do get lots of paedophiles justifying their abuse in terms of the child enjoying it or whatever, which is obviously repugnant.

Nevertheless, child sexuality does exist, and it is very important that we understand that so that clear boundaries can be established it and adult sexuality. Arguably, that is not happening at the moment. Look at the way children are being sexualised in our culture? This is exactly what shouldn't be happening.

Gentlemanjohn · 18/09/2017 08:35

I think what you're saying - and I would agree - is that when the wall between the realms of childhood and adult sexuality is permeated, then there's problems. Just because children have sexual fantasies and masturbate they still belong to a....it's hard to describe really...a completely different developmental space, a completely foreign universe in terms and emotion and cognition. Children should rightly be seen as fundamentally other.

SummerflowerXx · 18/09/2017 22:45

Hello again, do you have a reference for the 'some feminists' you reference as being included in those seeking to dismantle generational sexual boundaries in the 1970s? I thought feminism was instrumental in bringing child abuse and the potential for exploitation of children to the fore. Indeed, Angelides argues that a side effect of feminism's emphasis on child abuse from the 1970s onwards was that 'normal' patterns of sexual development were erased from discussion.

It seemed to me that feminism and liberalisation were not in consensus at all about this.

I also think Freud may have been closer to actuality in his recanted Seduction Theory when he saw hysteria as a result of abuse in childhood, than he was with the whole Oedipus thing (although I confess to not really understanding it). I am interested in your suggestion that he was a conservative; he was certainly not prepared to defend the poorly named Seduction theory to the turn of the century educated elite.

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