Hola mi Gente,
I’m
headed out for an interview, so I can’t dilly dally. I wanted to sink my teeth
into that whole Bill
Clinton going off on a racist rant yesterday that had Trump green with
envy, but that will have to wait. Wish me luck!
* * *
Childhood and Sexuality
Truth,
Fictions, and Myths
We do great harm to children when we
withhold sexual information from them. Today, thanks to the dominant
conservative voices, sexual education is a joke. Sex Ed, under the new
Victorian era, has been reduced to reading from a two-line script: “Don’t do
it.” “Get married.”
This is a crime...
Freud saw childhood sexuality as a
relentless quest for knowledge. The desire for information didn’t play as a
substitute for physical pleasure, it balanced it. From the very beginning,
sexuality seeks a language to explain itself. Freud was treated as an outcast
for daring to endorse providing children with that language -- with information
about their body parts and how they worked, about how babies are made and born.
At the beginning of the 21st
century, as the AIDS epidemic persists and our children need information most,
the pendulum has swung toward telling them less. A strategy of censorship has
emerged and it wears a particularly scary disguise: advice to parents to speak
more, to embrace their responsibility as children’s primary sexual teachers.
This is a “family value” that the conservatives can get behind and very few can
disagree with. However, a seemingly harmless parent-friendly idea can have a
less than child-friendly effect.
I expect the sexual prudes who rally
against school-based sexuality education are aware of what would happen if the
task of sexual enlightenment were left entirely to parents: almost nobody would
do it.
And the studies bear out my suspicions.
Parents do talk the talk: most agree that sex education is their job. However,
when it comes to talking the sex talk, few can bring themselves to do
it. One survey by the National Communication Association showed that parents
identified sex as the subject they were least comfortable talking about.
Similar research with children shows that they rate their parents’ efforts less
generously than their fathers and mothers. The first pattern that stands out is
the difference between the perception of parents and teens, one study showed.
When interviewing both generations of the same families, the kids consistently
remembered talking about fewer topics than their parents did. One longitudinal
study found that more than half of teens believed their parents understood
them pretty well. The bad news was that almost half thought mom and dad got it
somewhat or hardly at all.
Even someone such as myself, “Mr. Sexual
Freedom,” didn’t have a problem-free sex pass. I remember once entering my
son’s room full of 12-13 year-old boys and bringing up the subject of
masturbation. My son never forgave me for that one! LOL! Which leads me to
state that while teens might tell researchers that they wish their parents
would discuss sexuality more, I believe given the choice, they would rather
talk to a different confidante (an “aunt” or other trusted adult, for example).
I chalk it up to the incest taboo: children don’t want to know about their
parents’ sex lives (or masturbatory tendencies) and, from the minute they might
conceivably have a sex life, they usually don’t want their parents to know
about theirs.
What’s interesting is there is little
talk about the dynamic of how trusted adults become substitute sex education
teachers for children. I know that if I hadn't been able to get through my son,
I would’ve welcomed a trusted friend or family member to step into that role.
In fact, sex education teachers are the professionalized version of trusted
adults.
Children absorb their attitudes toward
love, their bodies, authority, and equality from their families. They are
trained in tolerance and kindness or their opposite. Few live in families
comfortable enough to discuss the nitty-gritty details of sex. And when we (we
meaning all of us -- society) don’t teach our children, guess who they
learn it from? They learn it from others who are themselves ignorant (i.e., their
peers or people with a sexual agenda) or those who may not have their best
interests at heart.
So, if parents aren’t talking to their
children and federally funded sex educators aren’t being allowed to talk
to their students, to whom will our children turn? I’ll tell you where, on the
internet or the street. And most of the information from those sources is geared
toward selling sex. In other words, sex on the internet is mostly
treated as it is elsewhere in our society: as something to use to buy and sell
-- a commodity
Then you guys bitch and moan about the
supposed lack of moral character our children? Pfffft!
The myth that exposing children to
sexual information before they are supposedly ready is detrimental to them was
exploded for me when I took the time to actually listen to and talk with young
people. Folks? They get it. Some of them get it better than you, believe
it or not. Kids get the wide range of emotions embedded in concepts such
as jealousy and desire, for example. Why not prepare them?
What consequences do we suffer as a
society when we choose to leave the most important discussion about the
most powerful force known to humankind to random chance?
My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery
from civilization…
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