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From: Rod O'Steele <rdsteele@yahoo.com>
Newsgroups: alt.sex.stories.d
Subject: {ASSD} When is Young too Young
Date: Sun, 16 Oct 2005 09:59:51 -0700
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The subject of the recent posts about AOC and viewing erotica riled me a
little and so I put down my thoughts. In my usual search for brevity it's
grown to a few thousand words. Any comments on the substance or form of the
argumentation would be appreciated.
When is Young too Young?
There was a recent discussion on ASSD on how young is too young to view
erotic materials. One person argued that is was the law, therefore it didn't
matter what was right or wrong, it was the law. I was surprised that sort of
statement was made there. Being of Libertarian persuasion myself, I don't
much respect those sorts of arguments. I am much more concerned with what is
right rather than what is legal. Doing what is legal without reference to
what is right led many Germans down a path of evil. And it made me start
thinking about the question, is porn bad for you? If not, at what age is it
no longer bad for you? That porn is bad for you has been the standard
argument used against all erotic literature since the Seventeenth Century as
a reason to suppress it. It's a wonder, and comment on Milton's influence,
that Chaucer managed to survive the Puritans. Shakespeare wouldn't had the
Puritans had their way. Of course, these are the same folks who argued that
masturbation caused hair to grow on your palms.
Why is reading about sex supposed to impel bad behavior? What about reading
Tom Clancy? Is that supposed to impel you to be a spy? How about reading a
Dashiell Hammett novel? Does that impel you to go murder someone? The
assertion that reading erotic fiction is somehow different than reading
other sorts of fiction and that it impels behavior when other genres don't,
is simply ridiculous on the face of it. No genre of fiction impels people to
behave like the characters in the story, except for a very small number of
true psychotics who will model their behavior after a fictional character,
whether that is a mass murderer or a sex fiend. And if we really care about
this very small number of nut cases, we'd be better off banning detective
stories with their murders and writing sex stories so that the nut cases won't
kill but will try to screw themselves silly. It seems like we'd be better
off.
Those Americans who have been lucky enough to live in Europe know how
ridiculous our ban on erotica really is. There, violence in movies and TV is
banned for minors, not sex. And guess what, Europe has much lower rates of
sex crimes, STDs, and teen pregnancies than the United States. You mean
suppressing a natural impulse like sex causes anti-social impulses? Gee
whiz. What a revelation. Material that would bring prosecution in America is
widely available on TV, news counters, everywhere in Europe. And the thing
is, it doesn't cause all those Europeans, adults or children, to break down
and become raving sex addicts. They are much more balanced and sane in their
approach to sex than Americans. "In America, sex is an obsession; in other
parts of the world it is a fact." -- Marlene Dietrich. Suppression is the
evil, not exposure. How many times is it going to take Americans before they
realize that Prohibition causes more evils than it solves?
And last, study after study has failed to find any real link between
exposure to erotic material and anti-social behavior. Readers of pedophilia
stories don't go out and molest children. It is true that pedophiles will
read erotica, but they are already pedophiles. The fictional accounts do not
turn them into pedophiles anymore than reading Thomas Paine turned Timothy
McVeigh into a murderer. A rapist is what he is whether he reads or not. We
don't automatically assume that he read a Truman Capote book and that caused
him to commit rape, only erotic literature would cause that. Absurd. That
sort of behavior is internal, not the result of reading fiction. More
importantly, not reading stories won't make them not be pedophiles. You can't
turn off the behavior by banning books. Catholic Priests spend their time
reading the Bible, not porn and yet we have had thousands of documented
cases of serial pedophiles among the clergy.
There is no reasonable person, by this I have excluded all evangelicals from
the discussion, who could draw the conclusion that erotica influences
behavior in such a way as to impel a reader into anti-social behavior.
Therefore, access to erotica should not be blocked for adults any more than
access to detective fiction or sports or any other material which gives
pleasure to the reader.
*****
As I mentioned earlier, this discussion was on a thread about keeping
children, that is anyone under 18, from seeing erotic writing. That
proscription strikes me as faulty and hard to defend rationally. Are
seventeen-year-olds really children? Granted, we in this country have done
everything we can to delay the maturation of kids, but the truth is that
they aren't children no matter how much we try to pretend they are children.
They are functioning adults. They are simply young adults with a lack of
experience. Preventing them from gaining experience won't help them mature
and it doesn't make them children.
Look at how biologists classify Primates. There are three phases by which
all primates are classified: infant, entirely dependant on Mother; juvenile,
increasingly independent but not yet sexually mature; and adult, sexually
mature. We can approximate human ages with these divisions. Until age 3 or 4
is the infant stage. Juvenile would be up to age 13 or 14 for boys and
probably a year younger for girls. After that humans would be adults as
viewed by standard application of science to humans. But of course, we don't
apply the same measures we apply to all other animals to ourselves. We are
special. But we ought to. We too are primates. I think these are much more
useful divisions to discuss whether or not someone is old enough to view
erotic materials than our current, child till 18 then adult, division which
has no nexus with reality or facts but is based on wishful thinking.
The idea of a 'teenager' is a construct of the Twentieth Century - an
unsatisfying attempt to keep young adults from maturing as they ought to.
And the real impulse is to prevent them from having sex, as they ought to.
No other age in history has tried so hard to keep young adults from
experiencing sex. Other societies have acknowledged the foolishness of such
an attempt and acceded to reality by marrying girls off as soon as
practicable after they reached menarche. The boys of course, were allowed to
'sow their wild oats' until they were economically able to support a
family - a benchmark which varied widely with the culture and the time. Our
hunter-gatherer forefathers probably married soon after puberty. Our more
'civilized' forbearers often had to wait extended periods until they passed
through an apprenticeship and gained a measure of economic substance. But
brothels, or their equivalent, were readily available to keep these young
men contented. One tribe had all of the widows live in a special hut. Once
boys sexually matured they lived in the widow's hut until they married. That
solved many problems with one hut, you might say. The widows got theirs, the
boys learned proper technique while keeping their raging hormones in check,
and the girls got an accomplished husband when they married.
The truth is, once a human matures sexually, they are an adult. As I have
argued above, adults should have access to erotic materials and that it is
not harmful for adults to see these materials. Per standard science the age
of adulthood should be the age at which the human matures sexually, menarche
for girls and production of viable sperm for boys. I agree that having this
as a legal limit would be difficult to enforce. "Excuse me kiddies, but
before you buy the magazine I need you to jerk off in this machine that will
test for viable sperm." I can picture some truly ridiculous results. How do
we set an acceptable age limit?
Well, let's examine the two remaining categories; first, infants. Would an
infant be harmed by exposure to erotic materials? Daddy is reading The Story
of O while Mommy breast feeds the little tyke. Is junior going to be harmed?
Not unless Daddy gets too excited and makes a grab for Mommy before the tyke
is finished with dinner. Then Junior might go hungry.
Junior is not going to have the foggiest notion of what Daddy is reading, or
watching or jerking off to since Mommy is too tired anymore. The truth is an
infant will have no cognizance of what 'erotic' even is. It would make no
impression at all since infants have no concept of the erotic. It doesn't
exist in their world view. They could sit on Mommy's lap while Daddy and
Mommy watched Debbie Does Dallas and it wouldn't make the slightest
difference. In fact, they could take junior into the bedroom and put him in
his crib while they made the beast with two backs, groaning out their
orgasms and junior wouldn't have any idea that anything erotic was
occurring. He'd go right on playing with his rattle and goo-gooing away.
There seems to be no reason to 'protect' infants from porn.
That leaves juveniles to consider. At the younger ages it would seem that
juveniles would behave similarly to infants, they would be too young to
conceptualize what is erotic and therefore could suffer no harm. Once they
are old enough to conceptualize what they are seeing, then it would seem
they are old enough to begin learning. Isn't this the basis of all of our
educational theories? Teach them once they can understand, and the earlier
they are exposed to any knowledge they can conceptualize the better they
learn. Why then is sex different?
"It is an infantile superstition of the human spirit that virginity would be
thought a virtue and not the barrier that separates ignorance from
knowledge," said Voltaire. And I think that this same idea applies equally
to erotica. People bemoan the loss of innocence of children exposed to
erotic material, but really all they lose is their ignorance. I remember my
own time when I was wildly interested in the differences between girls and
boys but in complete ignorance because no information was available. Was I
innocent or simply ignorant? I wasn't innocent at all; I lusted heartily in
my ignorance. I remember playing doctor with the neighbor girl when I was 5,
a very young age. I wasn't innocent - I desperately wanted to get her
knickers off - and worked my little brain to distraction talking her into
it. And I don't think I tarnished her innocence either, she seemed quite
interested in my little peepee as well. We did take a bite out of each other's
ignorance, for which we both got our bottoms paddled to remind us of our
Puritan heritage, but neither of us suffered a loss of innocence. And that
was very early in the juvenile stage.
So, it seems that children will fall naturally into one of two categories.
They are too young to even be cognizant of erotic content and don't need to
be protected from it or they will be old enough to be cognizant in which
case, applying standard pedagogic models, the earlier they learn and lose
their ignorance, the better off they will be as adults.
What follows is a very shocking conclusion; at least I find it shocking. I
can't believe I could even say it, but the truth shall make us free. There
is no justifiable reason to ban or limit the distribution of erotic
literature at all. If the child is too young, it simply will go over their
head and won't have any impact. If the child is old enough to be cognizant,
to understand, then exposure will vanquish ignorance, not innocence, and
learning will occur. Once they are old enough to think of the question, they
are old enough for the answers. Yes, yes, I know some parent will point out
the time their child asked some question that the parent misunderstood and
they answered in too much embarrassing detail and then they'll say this
proves that children are too young. Yada Yada. Another author, Switch
Blayde, told this anecdote, "My son is 28 and I remember an incident when he
was a little boy (20 years ago?). We were watching a movie that mentioned
condoms. He asked what that was. My wife and I looked at each other in
shock, and came up with an answer. Then he nonchalantly said, 'Oh, rubbers,'
and turned back to the TV." It is the parents who get shocked, not the kids.
Yes, it takes judgment on the part of parents to know which answer their
child is ready for. Do I say, "That's how adults have fun," and junior
shakes his head at the adults who don't know how to have real fun and goes
off to jump in rain puddles. Do I say, "That's how adults make babies," and
launch into the speech. These sorts of scenes are going to happen whether
there is a ban on erotic literature or not. Erotic literature won't force
the questions early. It will be part of the learning process when junior is
ready. The questions are already there whether adults want to admit it or go
on in their pretend ignorance. The parent's embarrassment doesn't change
junior's inquisitiveness.
I think the ban on porn for kids has more to do with their parent's
uncomfortable feelings in not wanting to discuss it. This is a reflection of
how sick American culture is when it comes to sex than any real harm that
could come to the kids in dispelling their ignorance. How often have I heard
a parent tell an anecdote about how they couldn't tell their child even
simple facts of life and how uncomfortable they became when the subject was
broached. No wonder our kids become crazy on the subject. They catch 'crazy'
from their parents. It is the parents who are the problem when kids have
questions about sex, not the kids. Exposing kids to erotica will not harm
them; their parent's attitude will.
Children learn from their parent's emotional reactions as much or more than
by the words used. Making sex an open subject, instead of a veiled hidden
one, will help shape a natural and rational approach to sex in the next
generation. I have many art books, painting, sculpture and photography,
around my house full of naked people. I don't worry in the least about them
being seen by anyone. Why should I? It is just people the way they actually
are. If a young person looks and has questions, I will answer their
questions honestly and directly. I know that they won't be interested if
they are too young. If they are old enough to be interested, they are old
enough to be told the truth. It wouldn't be any different if they were
looking at any book, a book on religious persecution or an erotic book.
Last, a disclaimer. I am not talking about using kids in porn. I have seen
images on the net that made me sick; pre-pubescent children engaged in sex
with adult men. Those people deserve the Elizabethan punishment, death.
There is a difference between fiction and forced sex. I think kids should be
allowed to read about the horrors of war as soon as they can understand, but
they shouldn't be forced to actually experience it. The same for sex. So don't
start calling me a pedophile and saying that dispelling ignorance is the
same as kid touching. I don't do the Moonwalk. But I do believe, having
traced the line of thought above, that exposure to erotica will no more
damage children than will exposure to any other genre of literature. If they
are old enough to understand, they will learn. If they are too young, it
will simply be irrelevant. In neither case will they be harmed. It is
ignorance that is harmful. It is their parent's displays of repression and
embarrassment that are harmful. Reading never hurt anyone, except the
ignorant and those who rely on ignorance to maintain their power. Oh my,
here I am singling out those evangelicals again.