Good Sex Illustrated (6 page)
11.
Mom
in a lovely negligee, with long, soft manicured hands, as in an advertisement for dishwashing liquid, is nursing her baby.
12.
School
: two boys, a girl, a table, goldfish in a bowl, educational games, pretty schoolteacher, little girls painting freely on a wall.
13.
Couple
: love story in six images. I: in the subway, a young man, standing, and a young woman, seated, are looking at one another, stiffly (man) or dreamily (woman). II: same people, at a dance hall, smiling at each other, dancing decently. III: same people, lying on the grass; they are dressed, smiling, arms around each other in a decent manner. The woman’s position suggests controlled consenting-object; that is, leaning against the chest of the man, head under his, eyes raised, her arm supported by the man’s hand. IV: same people, at a restaurant. Flowers, applauding, a toast going on behind them. V: same people, mating. The man is naked, lying on the woman, who is naked and flat on her back, all of this seen in profile. They are smiling like they were at the dance hall, their faces at a decent distance from one another. At the lower part of their bodies, the future of the species is being achieved decently, but we understand what’s going on even so thanks to the cutaway view of VI: here the man becomes a blue silhouette with a protuberance, the woman a pink silhouette with a cavity containing the blue protuberance.
14.
Family
from the beginning. The lesson about things has born fruit; the couple hasn’t had a fifth child, but there is a portrait of ancestors (grandma clinging to grandpa), a birdcage with two adult and four fledgling birds, the dog couple with five little ones—and, alone in its pot but radiant with duty accomplished, a cherry tree with its red cherries. I didn’t count them.
Such is this first volume, reduced to what conveys its “scientific” message. The book has a very difficult role to play; it reveals “the existence of sexual relations” to human beings who have no right to them. First, two comments. The book, in terms of the level of its information, illustrations and narrative, is comparable to books published for children 7 to 8; but for those turning 9 or 10, it is excessively puerile. Because the book grants the latter only information created for seven-year-old readers, it is pedagogically backward, notably in comparison to very articulated textbooks meant for the same age bracket—but which, it is true, deal with material for which there is no moral necessity to prolong the infantilizing of those being taught.
The second comment is that the book pretends to initiate complete sexual ignoramuses, whereas no child could be considered to be one—except for the sons of priests, if that. The information is a combination of psychosocial propaganda and persnickety gynecology; it neglects the “sex life” and neuters physiology—not when such a thing is too blunt for children, but when it would seem indecent to parents. The book goes so far as to keep quiet about phenomena that are very familiar to the youngest of readers—erection, the genitals of little girls, masturbation, fondling, orgasms without ejaculation, for example—but that family education represses and makes them forget. The child has no sexuality in the eyes of parents, and that is why they’re sounrelenting about it… It’s extraordinary that the illustrations even avoid depicting a kiss, even though their characters are endowed with “good” biological prenatal impulses, which keep orality in its place in the hierarchy.
The child will understand that, outside of organs permitting him to be a father and wage-earner (a tall and muscular body, education, appropriate clothing, short hair, car, toolbox for fixing up the “lovely house,” toothpaste smile, etc.), dad also has his baby-making tool. He has “what it takes” to uphold this father-role that society has given him, and to exercise his authority over wife and child, both of whom are precious objects and laughable subjects. This information invalidates the body of the child more completely than it had already been; and by describing to him what he can someday be, it orders him to conceal everything until then.
After this reading (repeated during three years of growth), children will be in no condition to make the slightest parallel between their prohibited sexuality and the activities that are depicted for them; they’ll retain only one thing:
that there is no lifting of the prohibition unless you’re an adult and you make a baby.
All the rest, even if it’s subsequently explained and allowed, will be forever instilled with guilt—subjected to the first pattern of childhood, to that “primitive scene” of antisexual propaganda: and this is the sole effect sought by the education of little children.
Thus, the parents, because they are the exclusive agents of a reproductive process, have what it takes to obtain thrills and to exercise powers forbidden to children: “sexual pleasure”, and especially, economic power, which many of the images stress in showing that the happiness of the couple is possessing and consuming. Nature, dogs, birds, cherry trees and parents determine the order for children/adults, which corresponds to a relationshipamong universal, reasonable and wholesome forces. I’m not capable of doing what my parents do, no one does anything but what my parents do, so I have nothing to do, except wait, while obeying them, to become like them.
In order to beautify(?) procreation, there’s a mixture of biological facts and perfectly dubious socio-economic stereotypes—whose antiquated methods are, moreover, typical of a conservative, petit-bourgeois life style from the 50s—the golden age of this beautiful ideal. The couple is well matched, permanent and careful to represent themselves in a good light socially; they have the affectionate private ownership of the children with whom they have supplied themselves. The child’s only existence is for this and because of it. All that he knows (family coercion, being shut up at home, the censure of his body, abusive discipline, an idiotic education, mind-destroying leisure activities) is his “natural” destiny, which began the day when the eyes of the man and the woman met in the subway. In a dignified way: since no matter how much one is “born of great pleasure,” our parents did not get that idea groping tits and balls during rush hour; that would be too degrading for procreation. True pleasure is the reward for moral dignity and biological orthodoxy. Orgasm is a school principal’s pat on the febrile head of the best student in the class.
When an ignorant child would ask his mother “where you buy babies,” he was perceiving his real situation very well: being an object in a society where all objects are sold and bought. Thanks to sex education, he’ll learn that family slaves aren’t bought: they’re “manufactured” by two of the people in your home. He, too, will make some later on: he’s accumulating the losses for which to compensate, the frustrations, the grudges, the loneliness and the terrors; and while waiting, the toys, the teddy bears, the dolls, theplaymates who are weaker are the ones who pay the charges. The “impotent” child chained to his family is already a very good reproducer of nonegalitarian order.
The imagery of married life, the family, education, in a dreamlike atmosphere of ear-to-ear grins, indicates where to put one’s energy in the search for pleasure.
For the child: a life in a bell jar, asexual affections, mothering of dolls or animals, a car you pedal, a cheerful school, castrating nudity—you can have a swim or play ball, but no fondling: on the contrary, if you notice that somebody has a body, you’re supposed to go tell Dad quickly.
For the adults: being a happy consumer, having a well-defined, rigid social role, possessing a lot of up-to-date and expensive objects, being the most valued of them all (“very pretty breasts” or shoulders “getting wider and wider”) and sometimes sampling the weird pleasure that comes with the act “that quite often implies the love of a little future being.”
Thus, the absence of erotic depiction in the book isn’t a negation of pleasure, but, rather, its wanton practice. The child is taught in which circumstances it should happen (intercourse-marriage), {
7
} why you do it (make a baby), at what age (in a very long time), according to which limit and with which vocabulary (“the young man will put his penis in the vagina of the girl” whom he’ll have wooed in a decent way for a year or two), and finally, in which position (Dad on top of Mom, who’s stretched out flat on her back, the only position that respects human law and the naturalorder, since “the little boys are” already “a bit stronger than the little girls.”)
Obviously, if it were a matter not of indoctrinating but of informing, not of imprisoning but of liberating, we would have remembered that pleasure is the best way to make a child understand sexuality. It’s the sole point in common that his body shares with that of the teenager, the very small or the adult—and also what makes girls identical to boys. But recognizing the erotic capacity of the child would redeem the reputation of uninhibited sexual expenditure, diminish the effectiveness of conditioning, ease the family’s grip on the child, acknowledge his autonomy as a desiring subject, and shake two fundamental pillars of the sexual order: the duty to procreate, and parents’ ownership rights over their products.
Let us marvel one last time at the legend of the baby-making couple, intended for the use of the children who’ve been had. That blissful and uncomplicated family subject to a just law; its new real estate, its new car, its new television and its vast brood; these little boys who never touch their pee-pee hose, and these little girls who have no sex organ at all; these easy, athletic, relaxing births where woman, in queenly motherhood and an elegant place like those where you have your nose retouched by a beautician, has just brought life into the world. In that society, there are no more poor or ugly, everyone is tall and thin, there are no more cripples or outlaws, inequalities or aggressions; you have children “if you want to” (but how not to want the “sexual pleasure”
that depends upon it?
); order is completely beautiful and everything under it and thanks to it is beautiful. You impregnate without getting hard, you come without moving; and just when you should, you “realize” that you “like being alone” with someone who—whatluck!—also likes being with you. The only problem you have when it comes to understanding things is whether Antoine or Isabelle should be the name of the baby you’ll raise in the very pretty house that you were able to buy when you had sensibly finished your studies.
This middle class Eden will be reduced to shreds by the “storm of puberty,” as our doctors say. Cardboard pastorals will no longer be enough to conceal the real order; in the child who is growing, it will finally be necessary to recognize and better control this enemy of all exploitive order—an enemy that so easily becomes that orders corespondent and even its source: desire.
TO LIVE HAPPILY, LIVE CASTRATED
WHEN IT COMES TO information for minors, the
Hachette Encylopedia’s
volume for boys and girls ages 10 to 13 constitutes the most oppressive document that can be read on the current sorry state of adult sexuality.
This is why I have focused so much analysis on this unhopedfor material; the fact that the book is written for children certainly hasn’t dissuaded me—especially since the final volumes (14–16, 17–18, adults) have nothing else to offer than a bigger forest for hiding the same trees—and what trees they are!
Neither can we neglect the contribution of “psychology” as a factor in the “success” of this particular genre, used as it is to dilute the batter, especially since this is the sole volume to benefit from it, thanks to the good offices of “Madame Claude Moran, psychotherapist.” This sprinkling of outmoded psychoanalysis obviously has nothing that could embarrass the general reader: the transparent castrating tricks and rapturous “familyism” of the work reminds us, rather, what smug, elephantine and God-fearing psychotherapy is practiced on our shores by a great many kind ladies, in love with Papa Freud or at least with his penises—and to whom,each year, they sacrifice quite a few children, as Abraham wanted to do with his son for Yaweh, with the difference that neither angel nor demon would know how to stop them.
The introduction for parents to this book already contains the following wonders:
Sex information for the child of 10–13 creates a problem for whomever is responsible for him. Very many parents have in fact told us that he has apparently lost interest in things having to do with the body, with the great mysteries of life. The constant curiosity that he exhibited for everything having to do with reproduction and genitality has been repressed.
In reality, during the period that comes right before the storm of puberty, sexual desire is dulled or, rather, diluted by the discovery of authentic schoolwork and exciting first experiences in camaraderie.
…The dialogue between parents and child constitutes an excellent antidote against the repressive adjustments that come to light around the ages 5 to 6. Certainly, shame, a sense of decency, shyness are useful elements in the psycho-affective maturation of the individual. But, like all repressive systems, they must be counterbalanced, to prevent their soon taking on a tyrannical nature.