Good Sex Illustrated (14 page)
In the context of such a pleasant form of modernity, telling a child that committing such and such an act puts him at risk for becoming different from everyone else later on is actually threatening him with a death sentence. It hasn’t taken him 10 or 12 years to learn that “difference” is the greatest crime: groups of children punish and exclude their members—him, too—for the slightest peculiarity, the least breach of code, and insist upon their authoritarian hierarchy of pleasures, values, powers. These interactions, modeled on those of the Order of the family, are an essential doublet of it; and you could certainly claim that recreation teaches the child more about normality than hours in the classroom could ever inflict upon him. The reproduction of order within a group of children is an intense experience; obedience is the primary aspect of a market in which the child trades in his useless freedom for group acceptance, which converts all sources of pleasure into capital. Submission, torments, sacrifices, as long as there is escape from isolation, from its physical and emotional desolation. The child who is banished by others (or the one who banishes himself from them) is condemned (or condemns himself) to a loathsome daily frustration, and also becomes the preferred victim of the group. A body with no owner, nationality or brand, he is like virgin territory waitingto be ravaged by the horde, lost cash that the group can snatch and squander: to be “saved,” you have to “belong.”
This dual status—an isolated body defined as different and unique and cut off from the sources of pleasure, but a body nevertheless, indeterminate, exposed to violence, subject to being comandeered yet remaining unmarketable—is what terrorizes children. Such a painful form of autonomy is useless, and the loneliness is worse than a state of simple insufficiency. Since children don’t own their bodies, in a society where such private ownership is the only protection of the body, the only way for a child to save what is his is by fusing with group ownership, gang, family.
Wielding the threat of solitary confinement—or, loss—is precisely how the father in the text I have just quoted persuades his son not to masturbate. Once he becomes an adult, the child escapes the danger of being destroyed, squandered, as a result of the privatization of the body—which the pre-adolescent child will himself achieve, gradually and under certain conditions. But his father warns him that if he tries to enjoy his limited degree of ownership, he’ll immediately lose its advantage and will find himself forever after confronted by dangers that it was supposed to ward off.
You think you’re privatizing your body in the name of pleasure, whereas you’re actually turning it into an object of exploitation, harnessed, molded and motivated in a way that the exploiting system can gain control of and put it in its place so that there is no spillage. As long as the child’s body can’t be economically exploited, the family holds on to it and inculcates it with privatization by the deprivation of pleasure: a nonprivate and nonproducing body is a weak and frustrated body, whereas a privatized and producing body equals autonomy and access to thrill. In this way, sexuality is defined for minors as a profit machine, reserved for adults: youplace your body in it to put it in action, and it pays you a revenue— pleasure. The child’s mind is cured of all temptation to act any other way; if he got the habit of using his body without investing it, he’d discover that pleasure is possible outside the deal, without submitting to the apparatus of exploitation—you can eat the bait without getting caught in the trap.
Sexuality in public and free forms of pleasure will become diseases, they’ll lead to prison or being grouped with the insane. Placation of desire will have to be associated with an ideal state of withdrawal: in the language intended for age 7–9, “desiring” translates as
liking to be alone with someone.
You’re a nudist, but behind the wall of family ownership—or inside a puritanical community cleansed of all desire, in which you take off your own clothes because a communal kind of clothing, enclosure, fence immediately reclothes you.
Making love as well means withdrawing to the most private part of a private place: night, bed, shut-up room. Parents recount the “matrimonial” act by showing virtuous scientific photos that are “informative” but hide what the slightest pornographic picture—though it’s “obscene”—objectively reveals. The example of a conjugal kiss won’t be taken from the home, the street, the subway, where children see it constantly (though they “shouldn’t”): it will be chosen from a scene in a movie. This private ritual is only visible and decent to the extent that it’s marketable—in other words, staged—and therefore vindicated of the offence of exhibitionism. Such a strange telescoping of the kiss combines the obligation of showing it with that of keeping it at a distance—upholding the distance between the child and “sexuality” and, within that sexuality, between the subject-role, which is public, and the pleasure-roles, withheld unless profit (a movie) justifies their deprivatization. Such is the law of this situation, which bourgeois legalese vocabulary has transparently dubbed: a carnal transaction.
This book has described how the economic pattern must be constructed, with its distribution of profits: the man will be the owner of the family, whereas his wife, as usufructuary, will have the pleasure of the children produced by the couple. This transaction secures a return on desire and constitutes the profitable model of investment to which it must conform.
But the child must also accept the complex system assigned to him by this model. At first, he must serve as the reward-object for his parents; his body is both privatized and collective—collectivized because it belongs to all family members, and private because access is prohibited to strangers on the “outside.” During the first years of his life, this contradictory obligation (you must privatize when you’re “outside,” collectivize when you’re “inside”), complicated by a host of exceptions and code-breaking, and increased twofold by the oedipal sexual taboo (the familial collectivization of the child’s body excludes the genital regions, or, should we say, takes an interest in them just to ban them) becomes for him a terrifying riddle—causing, in fact, quite a few riddled brains.
Later on, the child must gradually recover his body, his sex, and learn to reproduce the corresponding social role; without, however, such privatization, in which the sex remains unused (“frozen” capital), inciting him to sample any type of pleasure.
The duty to be sexual/not sexual is, obviously, unlivable; and the contradiction is resolved by oscillating from one pole to the other, from sex to non-sex according to circumstances, parents, friends, waves of self-repression—as well as the workings of the glands, which will soon lead to the protrusion of the genital zone beyond censorship, like the tip of an iceberg above the frozen oceanin which it remains engulfed. The “sex organs” become the only locus of sexuality, because in 12 or 13 years of living, you learn to prevent desire from dwelling just anyplace, sex included: but because of puberty, sex is what “pops up” even so. The rest of the body will remain forever shut up—if not for occasional leaks catalogued by the “pathology” of sexuality and that medicine persists in stitching up with foaming mouth and reddened eyes.
This moment of emergence and reappearance of sex on the “outside” of the armored body cordoned off by education is the thorn in the side of the flunkies and pigs who control the cattle of childhood. The danger is that this emergence isn’t content with slightly transgressing the censorship of the body, which would only let by an incomprehensible pee-pee or keep within limits a vulva already rendered more or less frightening by the drama of first menstruation for girls kept in ignorance. No, enveloping repression certainly can be completely broken down, bringing to light an anus, hands, a mouth, skin, and revealing that the body and sex are no more than one: and this wastrel of a desiring body, undivided and integral, will gallop away without your suspecting it and without your being able to ever get it back.
Normally, if family repression is skillfully accomplished and if surveillance, monitoring, indoctrination are increased during this sensitive years, there’s nothing very serious to worry about: there will be nothing but a slight itching in the area of the “organs.” It’s explained to the child that he mustn’t scratch and that it will grow all by itself. Once it has popped out or is gaping, hairy, ready for use in the rituals of matrimony, it will be time to move on to the next repressive phase, the “difficult age.”
At this point, the parents need only keep the child from exploiting the progressive privatization of his body within the family (sleeping alone, washing alone, studying alone, crossing the street alone, to some degree choosing his clothing, his leisure activities, his words, his objects, etc.: being less and less at the mercy of the eyes, gestures, touches, corporeal culture of his parents). All of a sudden the child is beginning to have “his own” body: capital to manage. The degree of autonomy of management allowed him by his family will depend, among other things, on how much they trust him: if he’s managing his body as he has been taught, or if he knows how to pretend he is, everything will be fine. But if some weakness, emotion, fantasy, irregularity, disorder, “vice” shows that he can’t or doesn’t want to accept this privatization in an orthodox way, there will be a step backward, his body will be again taken in hand, or he’ll be sent to a psychotherapist to be handled, or to boarding school, to a “reform” school. This is the period during which the results of twelve years of slavery are verified; and if the results are flawed, some rapid, brutal measures toward “recovery” are taken: for there is very little time left before the child must be freed and, willy-nilly, let out into the world of “commerce.”
The entire book for ages 10–13 touches only upon two aspects of its readers’ sexuality: masturbation, which must be prohibited (as a “premature” exploitation of privatization that risks causing deviancy); and seduction by strangers, which must also be prohibited (as “premature” sexual commerce, which risks not being commerce at all and becomes the child’s crime of body management, which is endangered in regards to its marketable normalcy).
Let’s take another look at the first point, before focusing on how the authors have dealt with the second.
If a child gets to like masturbation
, says Dad,
it will be harder later to love someone else.
This “harder” will be considered admirable: for Dad, it’s understood, “to love someone else” is always difficult, but if you jerk off,it will be even “more difficult.” The difficulty preoccupying Dad, of course, is fulfilling a good marriage contract. Loving
someone else
(would it be more “natural” to love oneself?) represents an impressive leap forward, the adventure of a petit-bourgeois with cant and hat wandering into the jungle and becoming fascinated by an extra-familial being, a passion that borders on eccentricity and extravagance—an idea that goes well with the ban on all sexual expenditure, which it serves to justify. Expending is dangerous. Looking, desiring, touching are dangerous. And solitary consumption, without looking at anybody, without “desiring,” but nonetheless touching, is dangerous, too. No “pleasure for one,” no squandering, nothing gratuitous: you could “get to like it,” not jerking off, but pleasure-in-and-for-itself, by yourself, or with two, or a thousand. You’ll deviate from the middle class economic schema of libidinal investment, and this is the schema to which it will become very hard to conform “later on.”
A “good” child doesn’t try to steal pleasure for himself. He conscientiously preserves himself until the very last day of his contract. Thus Jean has no knowledge of his sex, he doesn’t even imagine that you could touch your prick: his is as faraway as the Moon, it’s in Dad’s hands. Nevertheless, the question he asks lets us know that he’s a bit more informed than he lets on. In fact, he doesn’t ask, “It’s not allowed?” He says, “It’s not allowed because it’s dangerous?”
Dad isn’t surprised that his son, who seems to know nothing about masturbation, nonetheless knows that it isn’t allowed and has formed the hypothesis that it’s dangerous. Such certainties really go without saying in the system of “freedom” in which this trailblazing dad keeps his happy family… If that freedom weren’t pretence, a well-lubricated device for hyper-repression, the dialogue would have been something like:
Jean: So masturbation isn’t allowed?
Dad: Why, no, it is. You must have known that since you started jerking off.
Jean: Yes, but there are guys in my class who says that it’s bad.
Dad: It’s because of their parents, who “often say anything at all.” Those children are unhappy.
No. On the contrary, the text reaffirms the prohibition, points out that its previous pretexts are false, then states the “true” reasons for prohibiting jerking off.
If the child gets to like it...
Obviously there’s no guarantee that the child will get to like it. If little Jean had touched himself inadvertently, he would have been so bored, so disappointed (it’s not “better” enough), so disgusted that he would have run to take refuge in his mom’s arms, sniveling that the nasty thing had bitten him—even that it felt like it was stinging at one point. But alas, other children, snickering friends at school, the “big guys from eighth grade,” who have bad parents, aren’t so oversensitive: they’re “getting to like it.” They do it a lot, they flaunt the “practice and since twentieth-century-style masturbation no longer rots the spinal cord, even their body doesn’t punish them for it.
Fortunately, there’s an economic punishment waiting for them. Whereas the well-neutered child keeps his chances of later sampling this pleasure, which is better when it’s shared, his chance of making a profitable deal—an investment with a 100% profit yield (pleasure “doubled”)—his nasty friends will have nothing: they’ll spend their capital like water, and it will be at 0% until they die.
It amazes me that in choosing such an argument to dissuade its readers, this work has unconsciously stated the fundamental law of the sexual market at the center of the ideology that it’s defending. But we’re dealing with a pedagogy of reward systems, and therefore we must match the prohibition with a reward: castrate yourself andlook what you’ll get. Who’d refuse to deprive himself of something small (a little pee-pee, a little bit of pleasure for one) in exchange for something big (a good adult body, a good future deal)?