Good Sex Illustrated (25 page)

WHY SHOULD I REMAIN CELIBATE?
In our society, taboos forbidding sexual relations for adolescents persist, despite the wave of
sexuality sweeping over every front. Against those taboos, the adolescent brings the force of his sex instinct, which will never be more powerful than it is at that moment.

Sexual relations certainly are a factor in development. In relation to masturbation, they represent indisputable progress.

But it seems to us that sexual freedom can only be conceived under two conditions:

—not being penalized by a feeling of guilt or fear: each ought to take care not to underestimate the weight of education and the rules imposed by ones environment;

—assuming one’s responsibilities in two frameworks: finding out about methods of contraception to eliminate the risk of pregnancy, and, if you are a boy, not wronging your partner, who doesn’t always have the same reason as you to give in.

A man and a woman ought to feel mature enough to accept the consequences of their acts: the possibility of a pregnancy, the possible repercussions of these relations on going to school, the possible consequences on a psychological level. Girls don’t have the same reason as men to give in
(third mention).

SHOULD YOU REMAIN A VIRGIN?
Losing your virginity to satisfy simple curiosity, to imitate Dad or Mom, to do a friend a favor, or to do something that shows your independence from the home environment does not represent progress for an adolescent on the path of freedom and autonomy. In fact, the disappointments won’t be far behind. A girl ends up hating herself, she realizes that she was only a sex object for her partner. Unthinkingly cynical, teenagers will reject her unceremoniously after having gotten what they wanted. In the end, freedom at the exorbitant price of low self-esteem and contempt for others—which can be accompanied by remorse towards one’s parents and the fear of pregnancy—is a lot more enslaving that the constraints of families.

WHY DO GIRLS OF 14 GO TO BED WITH BOYS?
Most often, it’s not because they’re looking for pleasure. They are lonely and lack or think they lack affection. These little girls who go to bed with boys are very unhappy and don’t know what it means to give of yourself They beg for affection in exchange for their body.

IS HOMOSEXUALITY NORMAL?
A very important question. Adolescence is a turning point at which sexual tendencies are established for good. When the sex instinct explodes, a teenager has several possibilities: masturbation (a frequent tool of adolescence); fooling around (which means putting a damper on sexual impulses); actual sexual relations (difficult, seeing that the teenager lacks maturity and a sense of responsibility, and at that age it isn’t always easy to find a worthwhile partner).

It’s also often more convenient to forge a friendship with a buddy of the same sex. This phase is normal and even desirable. But it is only a passing phase. There are, however, boys and girls who, for diverse reasons, don’t go beyond this stage of homosexual relationships.

They are afraid of the opposite sex and don’t dare approach them.

Or special circumstances, such as boarding school, have kept them away from girls.

Or their parents weren’t viable models with whom to identify. The boy hasn’t learned to behave like a man, nor has the girl learned to behave like a woman.

And yet everything is there. It’s so much easier to achieve happiness if your behavior is in line with your sex.

One homosexual experience isn’t enough to endanger your future. But the teenage years are full of snares. Certain adults (whose sex instincts went off course earlier in life) are well aware of this. They pounce upon those young people who are still trying to find their sexuality.

You should refuse to have a conversation with them, refuse to follow them, even if they seem very polite and very cultured. It’simportant to pass the stage of homosexual relationships quickly and to mix with the opposite sex.

EXHIBITIONISTS
expose their sex organs to young people to prove their virility to themselves. Certain
SADISTS
try to lure them away in order to satisfy their need to do harm.

Don’t go with those you don’t know. Keep walking and stay calm. If the stranger insists, don’t hesitate to ask for help from friends, passersby, or an officer.

There are other sexually sick people whom you can run into on paths, in the woods or in public places like movie theaters.

The book intended for ages 14–16 ends with these “sexually sick people” whom you “can run into” (is that giving permission?).

I’m a little ashamed of having pulled together in so indigestible a hunk a group of quotations that I hadn’t even intended to comment upon, because my entire book is its commentary. I devoted a lot of pages to analyzing the volume for ages 10–13; I tried to detect the ideological discourse hiding behind its friendly surface. But this time I have nothing more to do; what I took so much trouble shedding light on has in this case been said straight out by the authors. Their unbelievable patching together of grandma’s louis-philippe-style morality goes beyond all the obscenities that I could say to unveil their intentions.
Complete sex information
will have had the following virtue: once again were able to put into the hands of boys and girls a dogma that originally made even newborns snicker—and that now, nicely laced with
vaginismus, sports idols, suggestive nudes
and
gentle and timid heroines,
relaunches its attack, more spirited than ever.

No illusions, please: the authors aren’t counting on their slimy arguments and homespun advice about economy to hold back adolescents who
don’t know what it means to give of yourself.
The jaws of the dogma yawn widely at hell—a hell that isn’t evil’s, but the Orders. Absolute power for parents, vicious social taboos, impossibility of minors communicating with one another, prohibition of being at one with yourself, constraint, isolation; actions constantly curtailed, lost, liquidated in any kind of glandular-excess toilet at all; traps for autonomy in a society in which the minor, nonproducer and nonowner can’t exist.

In dividing boys and girls so obsessively—men-strong-aggressive-intelligent, women-weak-submissive-stupid—the
Encyclopedia
isn’t hoping that they’ll copy Man and Woman for a society of inequality in which no one wants to live any more; they’re merely trying to misappropriate their desires, to arm each of them in his or her fashion so that they’ll go to war. War between these young males whose
aggressiveness demands total victory
, and these young females who write in their
diaries
and whose fear of parents, fear of pregnancy, fear of pain, fear of being abandoned as soon as “conquered” ruthlessly keeps them “virgins.” The aggressor and the aggressed: let each live this role passionately and believe even more in the role played by the other than in his own. Desire equals fear.

Body cut in two. Human cut in two: adults/non-adults; and in two again: possessor/possessed. Then an infinity of other discriminations, one after another, erecting each law of the market; the body is no longer even what transgresses these laws, it is what keeps them alive. It invests in them in order to exist—they thrive, and they destroy it. They want the living-dead, meat on which to live as a parasite, not corpses.

What does the sex education that “defines” the “confusion” of adolescence teach? Respect for
schoolwork, good health in general
, fear of
bad assocations
, boys from a
different background
, compassion and contempt for those who lost their virginity early, respect for the Family, respect for Virginity, respect for Medicine, respect for the social order, respect for the thrilling stages that will take the adolescent from the state of being an ugly and ridiculous model of frustration to being an irreproachable and handsome Father. Your bodies are a rough sketch, your face is a clumsy imitation, your brain is made of smoke, your desires are bestial and would corrupt you. This shower of spit in the face of kids, these pages and pages one upon the other with nothing but words of hate, lying, contempt; it’s all too much to “forgive” those who “love” so much.

All we need do, one more time, is to compare this lovely discourse of “understanding” from which I’ve copied the essential with these four little words: sexual majority at 14. The French torrent of repression, and Danish liberalization. Every sentence of the good French counselors answers
no
to what, elsewhere, has finally become
yes.

But I don’t want to dwell on this comparison. Enviable as it may seem to us, Danish reform is certainly not a revolution; it will relieve a lot of suffering, but it won’t change the source of it, at least not in the short term. It changes nothing, in fact, about the reproduction of the order. The child, the preadolescent will remain family-centric, put on the sidelines and oedipalized; a individual of 14 who will have the right to have sex will only have that sex after 14 years of training in
commerce.

Of course, as I’ve indicated, over there the family is more open. But this balancing of parental power is probably the case only after the first years of the child’s life. Because the murders of the very small, with the large amount of abuse that they imply, are currently as numerous in Denmark as elsewhere. Thus the “baby” plays the same role as it does in the libidinal system of French parents, for example. And this symptom of parental defects is even more significant when it’s observed in a country whose democratic structures, freedoms, tolerances, are at the forefront of Western capitalism and the passage to happiness for everyone—the spirit of “let’s all be owners” and “we only exploit what’s outside.”

These oedipal murders prove to us that an easing up of institutions changes nothing about the order and its defects; soft or hard, it produces the same effects. The familial order—corporeal capitalism—can only be reproduced through suffering, frustration and death. The suicides don’t diminish either: commercial pleasures, even if they are infinitely more numerous than ours, don’t restore life. And a sexuality, a desire, a corporality that is formed and indoctrinated for entrance into the laws of the market, production and ownership, remain just as alienated, as misappropriated whether the laws of this market are supple or implacable.

An easing up of the order signifies an “altruistic” and “objective” effort to remedy certain of its vices, instead of denying them as we in our country do; bur it comes down to keeping that order in place.

Note that the order in question no longer needs to weigh as heavily on all human behavior and that some of the things that overwhelm the body can be relieved—because the order is maintained only by its essential pillars. It’s like moving from a colossal architecture in the old style, where the structure rests on powerful foundations supported by enormous buttresses, to a “modern” structure, adroitly designed in such a way that its mass rests on a base that is slender, subtle in appearance, eccentrically minuscule in relation to the structure but supporting that structure more rigorously, more solidly than any massive plinth has ever been able to do.

To the extent that society becomes conscious of the onlypoints of support on the bodies of the exploited that are indispensable, it allows itself, here and there, the humanism to remove constraints that have become superfluous. These reforms are like rewards that a “good” exploiting state grants, a justice that it recognizes, a legitimization that it offers itself. The order is likeable, it does no more than it needs to maintain itself and thrive.

And all the conservative countries are drooling with envy at the small nations that have already constructed the Modern and Functional Order. We’ll have it, too, someday, we hope; it’s the future itself of the society of exploitation, its survival depends upon it. And to the extent that the dominant class, which by principle is resistant to all innovation, senses an urgency to reform one or another of its foundations, we’re bound to see the voting in of small freedoms that will make us melt with gratitude. How good the Masters have become!

In the long run, however, I think that Danish reform might constitute a completely new element of civilization, capable of calling into question the old sexual capitalism. The first generation to benefit from that freedom will content themselves with exercising it more or less strictly according to the laws of the market they were trained to accept. But perhaps later, the sexual market itself will be transformed by this, meaning that it will gradually be dismantled.

The new families of the men and women who will have obtained sexual freedom starting at age 14 won’t resemble ours. The child is bound to have a different role, a much better status. The libidinal misappropriations of the child by the family will no longer have the ferocity, the brutal determination that they have in the homes of the frustrated and guilt-ridden, who respect an order that was cudgeled into them.

This is an optimistic hypothesis, because if adolescents see their desire standing in the way of a market as tough as the one that adults are subjected to everywhere; if they’re not capable of inventing their own deprivatizing anticommercial freedoms that are the freedom of desire itself; they will only know pain, humiliation, frustration, and they will wait for the age of marriage-ownership with the same impatience they had about wanting to have sex.

A long time will be needed to determine whether this reform is in the end only a new bandage on an unchanged wound, or whether it has the capacity to heal gradually. In other words, if it is a process of reproduction of the order, or if it has the power to begin its true and complete transformation.

In any case, the hope that lies at the end of sexual freedom for minors is that their children will no longer have to be liberated: they’ll be born that way and will remain so. They alone will know how to remake a society they have inherited without having to endure its chains. No reform, if it can alleviate these chains, our chains, today, has any real meaning or stature unless it can keep us from passing them on to anyone else tomorrow.