Is that really what a child is? Certainly not, but it’s what the family produces as breeder of meat and whittler-down of men. As a “producer” unit, it is in fact capable only of destroying the children that it turns out. And it pushes its savagery to the point of refusing them any contact, any influence that would repair that destruction and compensate for that mindlessness. For the great majority of parents, raising a child in their image is manufacturing a stillborn moron, a slobbering calf, a shifty slave or a cantankerous vixen. The tragedy of “reproduction” is already consummated when adolescents, finally provided with a critical tongue, begin to put their family into words—and to reject it, whereas unconsciously they’ll belong to it forever.
The child of 10–13 is at the edge of that rebellion. The family imagined for him by the
Encyclopedia
is therefore infinitely more elaborated than the one meant for the little ones. The family he knows is a dumping ground of the wasted, the exploited, the dissatisfied that co-devours his life and tears his body, his mind, his desire to pieces. Yet it’s depicted as a gilded cage that bestows well-being even to the neediest, and where the child is gelded merely to restore his sex to him, in chaste scenes of happiness through incest times four, and with the miraculous capital gain that comes from a good pro-life fine-tuning.
This is where he discovers the kind of home he can himself create one day, and in which conditions. He won’t be clumsy and stupid like his parents: he’ll be like that man or woman who is well-balanced, cultured, healthy, thin and functional. He won’t lack money like his parents, he’ll suffer no humiliations, unfairness, he won’t be living on the bad side of exploitation: he’ll have a “modern,” distinguished profession, high earnings, an appearance beyond reproach, the socio-economic power to lead his own life and dominate others, like the couple in the book. He won’t live in cramped conditions in a noisy, unattractive home: just like in the book he’ll have a lovely house, a beautiful garden, space and calm. He won’t have too many children, domestic quarrels, disgust with married life, relatives who are a pain in the neck: he’ll found a liberated couple who’ll lucidly examine its problems, and will beget the right amount of children that would be appropriate to the development of each and the number of places in a car. Unlike his parents, he won’t be an exhausted, neurotic, bad-tempered, narrow-minded, duped, lackluster piece of human debris: he’ll be the way they are in the book: an active, dynamic, responsible, well-adapted, well-informed adult. He despises thebourgeois conformism of today? The important thing is that he loves the one of tomorrow.
It would be better for him to forget his real family; he can even hate it, provided that he restructure his revolt into the wish to build an idyllic, bourgeois and proper family: this will be his revenge. This is how he is pressured into investing his desire in a family-centric project, while the realities that he does know are soothed away and those to which he will be open are pointed out—the most “beautiful” family imaginable. The family is bad and young people are discouraged from reproducing this monster? Fine. But nowadays we have Science and Freedom, gigantic gifts from Medicine and the State: so tomorrows family will be a good one—a regular bargain to “take advantage of.”
For centuries they’ve been cheating the gullible in this way: because tomorrow, things will change and pigs will fly, forget that today you’re paying triple the price—and that tomorrow, like today, they’ll pretend they’re boring you to death, but you’ll soon be squealing like a stuck pig.
All of this has no obvious relationship to “sex” education. However, the issue of sexuality is omnipresent—but, may I add, inverted. In this domain, it would seem indispensable to explain to the child, while it’s not too late, what kinds of lies, blackmail and repressions have victimized him; to present the heterosexual couple and the family, with their morality and their passion for being the only ones to rule, as particular cases of sexual behavior and as historical absurdities from which knowledge ought to save us; to distinguish procreation as a minor possibility, a biological leftover of amorous activity—an accident, since that’s what adults call unwanted births (almost all, according to them).
On the contrary, we start with Monsignor Baby, the only acceptable and “meaningful” aspect of the sex life, and will pitilesslydescribe each detail of his conception, gestation, coming into the world, mothering, libidinal fantasies. We refer to all the rest as if they were little secrets of cooking that are a bit embarrassing, but that certainly must be explained to the kitchen boy if you want him to do good work. We’ll study the body because it’s the headquarters for the production of babies; we’ll approach pleasure as a curious byproduct of the act of procreation; and there will be no question of desire except through its conventions (preconjugal love story) or its alleged bad habits (oedipal mishap, masturbation, exhibitionism, sadists). The path of pleasure is strewn with thorns; desire itself is misfortune, defect, suffering, a terrible shadow that is a threat to the translucent delights of procreation. The family is the alpha and omega, all is subservient to it, everything that attains it is good, everything that steps away from it is bad.
“It’s awfully well organized,” murmurs Sylvie pensively.
If you say so, cutie.
Sexual initiation practices two kinds of misappropriation; linguistic and libidinal.
The linguistic misappropriation is very simple. The parents are the mouthpieces for medical knowledge; with precision they transmit the sexual lexicon that medicine has invented—and which is also a catalogue of organs that have no relationship to those with which the desiring subject is preoccupied:
“Show us the drawings,” asks Jean. “Oh! How strange!”
“Look: here’s an ovary.”
For words from everyday language, this lexicon substitutes a scientific, indirect, convoluted and abstract vocabulary. For example, instead of the three terms, you get hard, you fuck, you come, here’s how Dad explains it:
“Ejaculation is a spurt powerful enough for a sperm to reach the ovum
(sic, strictly).
The man has inserted his penis into the vagina of the woman. Of course, in order to be able to enter it, his penis must have an erection, or in other words, be hard.” Dadlooks at his son and smilingly adds,
“
You must have heard the word
hard-on,
that’s slang but it means the same thing…”
“But, Dad, what makes the penis get an erection? When I wake up in the morning, sometimes I have an erection, but the rest of the time it’s completely limp…”
This is how we get to a gratuitous kind of technical language about the knowledge of sexuality, in which the simple, familiar word is only “slang,” or in other words, subjective, extrafamilial, unscientific language, incapable of naming. Understanding what makes the word “masturbate” “accurate” as a way of talking about jerking off is to discover how middle class medicine contrasts the language of its own class with popular language about sexuality, a language that is shocking because it eroticizes the phenomena being referred to, whereas scientific language freezes it. In the same way, we also have “accurate” sexualities (fittingly medico-genital) and “inaccurate” sexualities (hedonistic, selfish, vulgar, perverse, etc.). Medical language affords sexuality a decency that allows it to be introduced, properly lubricated, into the conduit of middle class talk.
Moreover, a sexual initiation can’t be done within the family and in slang at the same time. Slang is the secret language adopted by desire to express itself in the face of repression, whereas the family is the first of the repressive authorities. Sex education exists to prevent the acts, to hinder and position them. The child is perfectly aware of the prohibitions he’s enduring; he knows very well why he knows nothing, and whose fault it is. He’ll sense that the sex education information being dispensed by his parents or the school, far from allaying his frustrations, is burrowing into them, rummaging through them, checking them, watering them down, setting up a system of language in them that will end up estranging his desire.
Compelling the child to say “my penis is getting an erection” instead of “my cock is getting hard” is dispossessing him of his sex, transforming an intimate, pleasant occurrence, which carries its share of embarrassment, pleasure and expectation into an anonymous, strange phenomenon, subject to a medical explanation that recuperates it and invalidates it.
But if Dad, like friends in class, said “cock” to his son, a kind of incestuous violation would be added to the linguistic violation. In fact, in a sexual initiation tacked by the parents onto the frustration that they are inflicting upon the children, all the words sound false, too near or too far away, always prying and always repressive—because these are the castrators who are saying them.
Undoubtedly, the child would be more sensitive to such aggression if Dad would use familiar language. Instead we stay suavely medical and won’t pronounce obscene words except in the case of certain delicate open-heart operations. In the work I’m discussing, the father only resorts to them three times: get hard, jerk off, have sex. These are words that, we are told, his children know; as secrets, they create an embryonic private life for them. Therefore, their appeal must be defused and the libidinal void must be re-established (you’ve got those words for hiding your desire, I’m taking them back); we must rout these pretty serpents from their hole and slap over them a lousy Latin word that stigmatizes them. Gliding from scientific heights to slimy familiarities, Dad castrates, castrates and castrates; the information on sexuality that he so generously deals out comes down to a loathsome expurgation of the desire that is brewing and growing in secret in his children.
In the end, we see that if Dad says “jerk off” is “inaccurate” and “masturbate” is “accurate,” it’s because the first verb is party to the thing, and it’s “inaccurate” for it to merit being party to it; whereas “masturbate” is a cold, lame, off-putting verb that makes the word being referred to appear ugly—therefore it alone is “accurate.” When you jerk off, you do something whose real name I know: here it is, the thing that will make public the filthiness of the pleasures in which you indulge.
Misappropriation goes even further when the scientific discourse downright misrepresents the given data. Examples abound page after page with the sexologists, who handle all the subtle falsification like master quacks. Here, specifically, is the part following the passage I was citing, concerning erection:
“…completely limp…”
“Because you’re still too young! At your age, erections come during sleep. But you can also be excited by a strenuous game, sports, or even a feeling that brings you pleasure. With adults, it’s desire that causes an erection.”
I wonder what all the boys will think of that explanation who at eight as at thirteen have the depravity to get hard while awake and do it on purpose; whose fingers are quite familiar with the “strenuous game” and the “feeling” that “brings pleasure.” Will they be worried about being abnormal? Will they be proud of it?
But why this big fat medical lie? Obviously, there are boys who are so castrated that they are like little Jean, completely surprised when their pee-pee sticks up, incapable of seeing the cause of it, (if there is one—“involuntary” erections are neither more nor less frequent with adults than they are with children), boys who become wide-eyed if someone explains to them that with adults it’s because of “desire.” What dat? In principal, the book postulates that children have no idea of it, and it sinks into a ridiculous dialogue (but one that, I’m sure, will soften up the mothers in the family):
…
it’s desire that causes an erection. The desire for someone else.”
“The desire for someone else? As if you wanted to eat them?”
Mom bursts out laughing. “Now aren’t you the big eaters! But that’s not altogether wrong… Desire is like a kind of craving and even like appetite. When you want a piece of cake, your “mouth waters.” When a man and a woman look at each other with pleasure, desire one another, want to unite intimately, certain physical changes happen that prepare their bodies for that union.”
“But…” sighs Jean, “isn’t desire love? In movies, on television, when lovers kiss, they’re thinking of cake?”
“Mom was just giving an example, big fella! If I’m cuddling with Mom, I’m also desiring her, but that has nothing to do with wanting some pastry! I’m also moved, filled with tenderness, I need to caress her.”
“And that gives you pleasure?”
“Yes. Desire’s part of love. Men and women love to unite and not only with the hope of having a child.”
“And animals?”
This wonderful passage clarifies for us the motives for the lie that I was pointing out. If the authors are committing it—even if they are addressing readers who are in the best position to detect it—what they want, at any price, is to disqualify the sexuality of the prepubescent child. They’ve depicted the erection as the necessary and satisfactory condition for intercourse—and yet the child gets hard, too, unfortunately. The only way to put him back in his place is to destroy that erection with casuistry.
Consequently, the child won’t “really” get hard, it’s involuntary, anything at all can stiffen his prick, except desire, the real thing, that remarkable “desire for someone else” that leads straight to the marriage bedroom. Does the boy have sex organs? Why no, it only looks like it, he has nothing at all, it’s only hot air, he doesn’t even know what to do with it.
The child is actually kept in such ignorance and at such a distance from his genitals that he can get hard without dreaming of taking the least advantage of it; it’s what’s left, like a monument still standing in a city razed by war. Once emptiness has been created in the mind of the child and around his body, for him his penis becomes an instrument that’s out of order, and for good reason.
But this “perfect” castration is far from being the rule. First of all, the family—I’ll explain this later—symbolically makes use of the child’s sex. Next, it’s false that the erections of a lot of prepubescent boys are involuntary, uncontrollable, incomprehensible, “passive.” False that they don’t know desire, desire for a person or desire for pleasure. False, finally and especially, that a child’s right to an erotic life must increase in relation to his ability to make love exactly like dad-mom. His body isn’t the same as theirs, nor is his penis; his mind isn’t the same as theirs; his amorous needs are his own. Incapable of procreation and relatively incapable of orthodox coitus with an adult according to the model of matrimonial, puritanical fornication, he’s nonetheless prepared for pleasure, a creature (as all parents and all doctors know) in whom desire awoke at the same time that he opened his eyes, that his body touched its first objects and received its first pleasures. Whether it’s deliberate or unconscious, family repression forces him to unlearn what no one without such repression would ever have the need to relearn at a later time.