Deva & Quantam: I'm intrigued by your posts and hoping you will find the time to flesh out your reactions more.
Quantam stated, in particular: Echoping Deva I'm waiting to have a bigger window of opportunity to pen a quality response, but as a placemarker I'm
a)worried about the sexualisation of children in our culture
b)a firm believer in increasing children's rights and responsibilities
c)fascinated by slash as cutting edge queer theory
and d)aware that most reading kids discover sex from adult books as I did.
I am also very concerned about the sexualization of children in our culture--their sexualization as the object of adult desires. We should hope that children have many paths available to inhabit their bodies fully, but sexualizing them as objects of adult desires cannot but distort their own coming to erotic awareness, because the power dynamics are too stark.
This may seem obvious, but I think it bears repeating: children have virtually no power in our culture beyond symbolic power--the symbolic power of "innocence" embodied, which is powerful enough to evoke complex, and simplistic, sexual responses. (As the current NAMbLA discussions on the board reveal).
But anything with huge symbolic power in our culture tends to produce simplistic readings, in my experience. So, when I get into a discussion about children and marketing--which inevitably means a discussion of sexualized messages--with my students or my relatives, say, I find children are described in blunt dichotomies they are either "too impressionable" (i.e., "unlike me!" the speaker implies, usually it's a way to assert a kind of maturity/sophistication, especially in young adults, I find--i.e., "we're impervious to ads but the poor kids aren't"), or "today children are so much more [savvy, or knowing, or aware of sexuality] than previous generations" (I.e., "when I was a kid we didn't know anything about ...").
I don't exactly buy either of these readings (which I haven't seen in this thread, by the way). They are both typically about what the speaker wants to believe about hirself, and not very insightful into children's experiences.
The key (and again obvious) facts about children are that they are physically small, usually have no independent source of wealth, and they have not experienced many key developmental stages--whether mental, emotional, or physical. They are, however, like most socio-economically weak people, typically brilliant in their intuitive understanding of power-relationships. When you don't have power, you have to be very observant and aware of those who do have power--although individuals will vary in their abilities to articulate this awareness. You don't survive without this attunement to those with power. But, because they are always in the one-down position, and inhabit the disempowered position in so many ways, children are not in a position to negotiate those stark power differences in a healthy way on their own.
I've been thinking about this a lot in relation to female development: because young women are sexualized so ubiquitously as objects of male desire it is virtually impossible to grow into sexual subjectivity as a female in this culture. I say this not to make males on this board feel defensive--although I expect it might--but to offer it as a kind of sad fact.
If you, as a female, do resist the cultural messages at any level, you're left with a tangle of feelings and sensations: you want to experience pleasure in your body, but you're aware that it's hard to disentangle "your own" pleasures from the pleasure of getting attention from someone who has power over you. (And should you have to?, you might ask. Can [or, if the girl wants to be* straight "how can"] my pleasure in a man's attention be a legitimate part of my sexuality?)
What I see in my female students and have experienced on my own is a twist on the old Freudian question: what do women want? In my experience, beyond masculine attention, many young girls don't know what they "want." And although they often understand that this desire to be the focus of the male gaze is deeply problematic, it has a deeply, overwhelmingly attractive quality and seems entangled with what it means to be heterosexual/straight...
I just realized that I think a recent book has made some of this same argument, and it has, it's the book Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture
You can read excerpts from the book by searching inside it on amazon and reading the reviews. (I have to confess that this is another book I've been meaning to read but haven't.) But she seems to correctly assert that by and large the cultural message to teens is: "Girls have to be hot. Girls who aren't hot probably need breast implants. Once a girl is hot, she should be as close to naked as possible all the time. Guys should like it. Don't have sex."
This seems to summarize for me the basic text that most (US, anyway) children are "reading," almost all the time, today. (Although the degree to which the "breast implants" message is included per se is perhaps debatable.) It, to say the least, is part of the bad and the ugly of messages about sex directed at children, and it is UBIQUITOUS.
Parents who are most likely to shield their children from that message are probably counter-cultural in some way--hippies, academics, and, ironically perhaps, religious conservatives (I'm thinking especially of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish parents I know). The latter groups, however, typically want to go back to a very patriarchal structure.
The former groups, "progressives," i.e., people more akin to barbelithers, would like to know a different path, but are mostly feeling pretty muddled about it all, I suspect--if they're like me! And there may be interesting slash fiction out there, but it's on a web full to the brim of so much that's retrograde...and often, as Levy's book points out, retrograde under the name of "feminism" or (more likely) "post feminism"...
How is a child to find their way to what might be valuable? Can an adult writer move beyond autobiography** in this world in a way that ethically engages with children's sexuality in a real way--without running into the same power dynamic I just described vis a vis female sexuality?
I am pretty sure they can, but again, I'm not sure a US publisher would go anywhere near it...
*I say "wants to be" because the desire to be sexually "normal" is so strong that that desire is itself something to be negotiated as one works through sexual identity, beyond simply the desire "for" another person of whatever gender.
**edited to add: Wait...on second thought, autobiography directed to children that is sexually explicit might be extremely problematic. Baldwin's work is not directed at children, after all, but is describing his own adolescent experience for other adults. So I must think more here... |
