Free Good Sex Illustrated by Tony Duvert Page A

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