On the one hand, the first bud of youthful beauty is the most luscious. But on the other, pick that bud too early and you risk entering a world of hurt — theirs and yours.
Ephebophiles
Most people, it seems to me, are actually Ephebophiles: they are attracted to young
fit post-pubescent young men and women. The Law might insist that you don't
touch until the age
of consent (which can be anywhere between 13 and 21, or not until you
are actually married, depending on where you live in the world). But mother nature didn't pop
those D cups on to my daughter's chest just so that people would ignore them.
So it seems strange to me that the law criminalises the natural desires of most men, and though we are less explicit about it, women aren't blind to the tight pert botties of young darlings. And in case you think the law is a natural one, it is actually only quite recent (19th Century).
How did people cope before? By common sense, parental control, and by a desire to see your children, especially your girls, married off as soon after puberty as possible so that they didn't run the terrible risk of having illegitimate babies and committing the sin of copulation outside wedlock. And by also not seeing childhood as a distinctly different state from adulthood as we do today.
Today it seems natural to construct "adult" and "child"as if they were opposites, rather than two strands of identity that run in parallel. Our Laura, a fresh limbed teenager, still has much of the child in her, but she has had an inner-adult insider her ever since she was a toddler. Many adults I know are pretty childish. Adults like to think we have a strong inner-child ourselves nowadays. The idea that they are different, child and adult, mutually exclusive, and that when one ends the other starts is just crass; a legal fiction.
Pedophile
Pedophiles are the new witches, the new Reds under our beds. They are the construction of the totality of everything evil. They are monsters.
Or they can be. Abduction, rape, and murder are most terrible crimes, the more so when done to a defenceless child.
Having unforced and un-coerced sex with a child is also very wrong. Now I don't accept the idea that a child is unable to give consent - after all, we put children on trial for murder on the basis that they knew the difference between right and wrong. Denying a child's consent means that all sexual contact with a child is rape, and then how do you distinished between actual physical rape and legal rape. But all that aside, a child's consent is not sufficient to allow an adult to have sex with them. However, common sense should prevail. A 18 year old having sex with a 15 year old is a very different proposition from a 42 year old having sex with a 12 year old.
But basically, I have no major problem with banning adults from having sex with children. What does seem to stink is the efforts to criminalise children having sex with children.
It seems we have boxed ourselves into a moral corner which states that ANY sexual contact with a child is evil, even say when a ten-year-old boy and a ten-year-old girl go exploring together. Which is odd, because it presumes some very strange notions:
1. That children are sexless prior to the age of consent (whenever that may be in which ever country you live in). Yet children are brimming with sexual curiosity (how could it be otherwise - adults make such a big deal of it). And almost all children have passed puberty several years before the age of consent. Everyone knows this. Everyone will admit to their earliest sexual adventures occurring long before, when still a child. In the UK, a third of people lose their virginity by the time they are 15 (16 is the age of consent), with 17 being the mode average. Children are not sexless. Children have sex — it's just childish sex.
2. That sexless children suddenly are allowed to become sexual adults at the turn of a birthday, unguided by sexual experience, except for the frosty theoretical teachings of sex education.
3. That children "rape" other children even when there was mutual constent. I find this too bizarre. The image of a child chained in manacles on trial for "raping" another child is so surreal it beggars belief. Obviously such things only happen in the most backward of countries — you know who you are (hint: their Infant Morality rate is ranked 23rd among the world's industrialised counties but their stealth bombers are top whack); shame on you.
4. Since children are "sexless", ergo any sexually active child must be sick and "need" therapy (as well as probably being criminal) - not just the abusive experiences.
The outcome of all this moral panic seems to be some pretty undesirable things. Firstly male strangers are demonised as likely threats to the safety of your child. Now heaven knows, having a pop at men for all the ills of the world is fair game, but even I think this cannot be a healthy attitude to have towards men.
A second outcome is that innocent nudity is under threat. You can't be nude with your children, or have them be nude with you, or have photographs that contain nudity, or allow young children to play in the nude in public. Are our bodies that dangerous? This doesn't seem to be a healthy attitude to have about our bodies, or a healthy way of encouraging intimacy between our bodies.
A third outcome is that you can't allow your child to see any sexual behaviour. Heaven forbid that they catch mummy giving daddy a blowjob or engaging in any other form of mutually pleasurable loving sexual behaviour. Which is odd, because our society is dripping with sex: Sex in adverts; Sex in Boy Bands sold to tweenie girls; Sex in magazines; Sex, of course, on the Internet. Sex and sexualised imagery is everywhere. But of course, as children are sexless, they're not going to notice. Yeah, sure.
Yet another outcome is that the real horror: of children who runaway from cruel families (or are thrown-away) — a much much much more likely statistic than having your child attacked by a pedophile, is not addressed. We want the monster to be without, not within.
And of course, the final outcome of this moral panic, the ironic one, is that by "protecting" children from the evils of sex, we are potentially creating sexual dysfunctional problems for our children in latter life, the likes we have not seen since the good old days of Catholic sex education: you'll burn in Hell for masturbating and all that crap. A generation of children fearful of strangers, under touched by their parents, with hang-ups about their nude bodies. By trying to bubble-wrap our kids from the pedo monsters, we are suffocating them.
Nepiophilia
If the line between sex and comfort can sometimes be vague with children, with
babies it gets very blurry. We know of friends that follow common African
and Indian practices, lightly masturbating their babies to make the baby restful
(for girls) or more manly. And you see mums with their babies kissing their
botties and tummies, and tickling their genitals. All mums do. But it's just
play. But of course, now, it could well be constructed as "abuse".
Of course that's a world away from actually ejaculating over a baby. I struggle
to see babies as in any way sexy, as nepiophiliacs do.
Be careful, of each other
So where does this leave you? How do you act without being caste out of civilised
society as a monster?
Well it's pretty simple: do not hurt children, do not have sex with them, keep them safe and keep yourself safe.