Good Sex Illustrated (21 page)

During the first anxieties about puberty, the adolescent will turn to his mother.
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I HAVE ONLY A FEW MORE THEMES to examine in this last chapter, and I will center them around the final period of training for the reproduction of the order: the period during which castrated children learn to one day become castrating parents. Adolescence, in other words.

In the relationship between the minor’s family-centric, pubescent and semi-privatized body and the repressive elements of the sexual market, the normalization of the exploited will be developed.

Since we in our country fear any “deviant” imperfection in the finish of the human product, this essential phase can’t be left to the random nature of Danish freedoms; and the Hachette volume intended for French adolescents, who are prohibited from having sex, is therefore a veritable catechism of self-repression.

It’s important to differentiate the phases of indoctrination. From early childhood to puberty, the minor is taught orthodox management of his body by castration, parental collectivization, censure, detention, complete build-up of capital. The result is a little subject that is good at management, impatient to invest, well informed about the socio-cultural criteria that allow him to estimate the value of others and his own value. A life outside the family reduced to a minimum strengthens this internalization of values and whets the appetite for ownership, the desire for superiority and power. He or she is “outside” just enough to put this into practice, to refine that indoctrination and load it with images, without risking compromising it by precocious experiences or deviations from management that are too disturbing. We have, finally, a sex-object that is indecipherable and taboo and the future key to the orgasm-ownership machines.

After puberty, these elements remain. Even if you have the right to a sex life, it hardly risks altering the construction of the adolescent as his own property, maintaining marketable, hierarchical relationships with others, conforming to prior roles and the laws of profit. The only possible deviancies will be infrequent and restrained; they will continue to conform to this corporeal and sexual capitalism. They will merely be discredited, “negative” investments, which will be in tune with the values of the desirable—a cultural determinant of which the young child is unaware—and the conventional rituals of pleasure—another cultural element with which you only come to terms after having subjected all desire to it.

In brief, whether he’s free or enslaved, heterosexual-conjugal or a cruiser, someone who beats off or a queer, the adolescent makes his appearance on the market like a normal product. meaning that his body, in every case, obeys the social laws of the privatization of the individual and restrictive investments. Whether he buys his partner by amorous giving-to-get (the only form of affective relations that he’s been taught) or squanders his desire as so much capital, he’ll continue to believe in the trilogy of work-ownership-power and in the social and sexual roles that it controls. He’ll remain sheltered from the “danger”—which would be discovering the gratuitousness, freedom, plurality of desire and the
sociability of the body,
or rather, discovering it again, since the child is and lives all of that before the family crushes it.

This freedom, accorded to
finished
machines, is therefore not incompatible with the prosperity of the system; and this is why Danish democratic capitalism has just emancipated minors (Sweden is about to do the same). Only in societies of hyperre-pression and crazed exploitation can one see in the minor’s “programmed” sexual expenditures a risk for anarchy, dissidence and flight.

So, none of that in our country. What I will quote from the propaganda written for the 14–16 age group will make this obvious.

It seems to me that this double set of numerals, 14–16 years, is enough to indicate the antisexual orientation of the book. In fact, if it was conceivable—not considering censorship—to write books for children that are adapted to their vocabulary, such an educational necessity no longer in the slightest justifies dividing up information for the minor into three minutely differentiated parts responsible for covering the period of sexual frustration from puberty to the legal age of majority: 14–16, 17–18, adults.

But let’s start with the last and go backwards. The volume for adults is thick, cultivated, costly, quite up to date when it comesto official sexology. It is illustrated with medical documents, photos of every type (including some female nudes/objects and frightful dads with beards and body hair that you also find in the other volumes: virility of the signs of power covering the body of the Master, femininity as an exhibtion of surfaces to conquer). There are also works of art, reproductions of paintings, sculptures, prints, which mark out the correct part of the cultural patrimony dedicated to Eroticism in the sexuality of the middle class adult (a noble art/discourse of pleasure, opposed to vulgar, acultural, proletarian and persecuted non-art, which is pornography).

All of it is a reproduction of the already commercialized sexology of France, modernized here as merchandise by a well-put-together edition: let’s not forget that this book is expensive, and the targeted customers are privileged parents from the middle classes.

The information, which is neither new nor more objective than the others, overhauls its look by a penchant for the topical, “journalistic” aspects—in the
Paris-Match
sense of the word.

In the volume for adults, as well as in the ones for ages 17–18 and 14–16, they have avoided the pitfall of pornography, obscentity, the outrageous: no photographs of erections—they don’t even reproduce the document, unique to France, in the volume for ages 10–13—no photograph of a vulva (there are some nice explicit diagrams), no intercourse shown at the angle where there’s something to see, medically speaking. It isn’t censorship, obviously, it isn’t cowardice about the frankness that the medical “cover” of the works was permitting; it’s simply that such photos are superfluous. Adults don’t need them any more, whereas children or adolescents would be unpleasantly traumatized by them—or, even worse, incited to that
physical pleasure
that you
share
with a piece of printedpaper, when you have nothing else. Pleasure that evokes that of starving people chewing the leather of their shoes.

The illustrations make up for it with very slimy images of childbirth in close-up, the babies all wrinkled in incubators and the X-rays of well-filled uteruses.

There’s not a cartilage missing in the diagrams of impregnating coitus. The color cross-sections of erections are dynamic enough to wake you up at night. There are all the tiny beasts you could want in the microscopic images of jism.

The strongest accent is on the adaptation of the adult to society and its norms, the only surety for happiness. They bask in a few reflections on sexual equality, the taboos that are disappearing, the right to pleasure within marriage. They sternly remind us of the importance of men and women submitting to the father-role and mother-role, upon which depends the future normality of their own children, that is to say, their ability to play these roles exclusively and rigorously when the time comes.

The volume for ages 17–18 is identical to all that, but less cultivated. Less Freud, less philosophical reflection, a negligible amount of “artistic” illustration, much more inflexible warnings, but in a reasonable, moderate tone; they’re talking to the “big teenagers.” The content of the book, however, is less like the volume for adults than the tissue of nimble lies and “managed” medical information that we saw in 10–13 years and that dominates, even more dispassionately, 14–16 years.

A strange kind of composure. Because these books insistently take the risk of being subjected to the critical minds of students—but the propaganda couldn’t give a fig about being detected, this isn’t its concern. It already knows that it won’t convince any of its rebellious readers, young as they are; it won’t reform any of theteenagers getting a good laugh out of its pro-birth and antisex gobbledygook; it won’t convince a single happy meat-beater to give up his pleasures, nor one homosexual kid to daydream about the opposite sex, and so on. What it wants to do is to reign over the vast universe of feeble brains that has been well prepared, well twisted by the family and school; to regiment the sexualities that are a bit off, all the impressionable ones, the timorous, all the frustrated ones consumed by shame rather than revolt—all the resigned ones from the two sexes. Those who passively put up with the family, school-work, the nasty Outside, and who won’t hesitate to hand over their sex to the educator so that he can redo it for them. {
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It should be kept in mind, regarding all of this, that we’re dealing with objective sex information, sincerely drafted by some scrupulous doctors who want to be useful to their fellow man. They’re upset that there are still so many prohibitions, so much guilt, fear and obstacles to happiness; they are sorry that we have distrusted pleasure for so long, and that for so long we have exploited the inferiority of women—and done it despite the fact that they can become Mothers! It is only in small places between the lines of their explanations that we can flush out all these blights that they’re fighting so fiercely and transmitting so well. The Order no longer resides in clauses of the code of law: it invisibly saturates every sentence of the “liberal” discourse. The authors need a nice big subject that is really at odds with procreative ideology in order to bare teeth uncovered by a smile.

The work for ages 14–16, which I will quote as needed to wrap things up, is a maximum reduction of the learned and well-organized material in the volumes for those who are older. It is composed of questions and answers, like all catechisms and all propaganda brochures. {
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} These questions
are real ones asked by teenagers
during
educational talks
given by the authors. Rather “biased” information if we are to believe the import of the questions that the speakers in these talks managed to dig out of their audience.

In them, there is little theorizing, practically no pondering, they “guide” and force you into things with alacrity. Openly repressive information represents 44 pages—consecrated to the “psychology” of puberty and adolescence. Medical information, insidiously working to cause guilt and jam-packed with bogeymen takes up 95 pages. No more “art” at all in the illustrations (the readers are too young to understand the representations of middle class Eroticism, overseen by the male heads of the family and their luxury bookshops). Coitus has been reduced to the essentials with well-done sketches in color pencil: these cocks in cross-section are already so obscene that they have to be surrounded with the cross-section of a vagina to show where the little wrigglies go to find the big egg.

There’s no more story, a family romance like those in the volumes for the younger children. They speak directly to the minor, like elder brothers, like human beings plain and simple, who help and loyally advise. A loyalty I am about to assess.

Disappearance of the family. This, for example, is the only father/son interaction in the work:

How did the young and athletic dad for ages 10–13 suddenly become this fat jerk shown only up to the nape of his neck, with his big ass and suspenders, the detestable image of Power? And why has good decorating and the lovely second home given way to this seedy place?

One thing is sure: you can’t hope to seduce the reader any more by scenes of family bliss. He’s going through a period of dissidence, revolt, painful frustration; to shove a family under his nose would be an enormous blunder. You don’t talk about rope in the house of a hanged person.

And thus, this vindictive photo (impeccable doublet of the man-in-the-park for ages 10–13), meant to rub the teenager the right way:
This book was written for you by two men and two women,all four of whom are doctors… We hope that it will show you the way to a better understanding of the things of life.
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All the iconography yields to the necessity of rubbing out the tyrants and showing hope—the fictitious kind. So much so that its antifamily stance corresponds to the same emotional and effective touting as the family photos of the preceding volume.

Family: 6 photos; babies: 3 photos. Outside world: 35 photos.

In them you see groups of adolescents, boys and girls together or looking into each others eyes, hand-kissing (but of course). Posters, demonstrations, Womens Lib, streets, cars, motorcycles, movie theaters, the urban landscape, all the “permissive” stuff. The outside world has finally been authorized: no more sadist behind every tree; instead, future spouses on every public bench. How the world has changed, suddenly! The proof:

Depictions of sex organs
(photos devoted to “external genital organs”):

—children: boy, 0; girl, 0.

—teenagers: boy, 0; girl, 0.