Free Good Sex Illustrated by Tony Duvert Page B

relatively incapable of orthodox coitus with an adult according to the model of matrimonial, puritanical fornication, he’s nonetheless prepared for pleasure, a creature (as all parents and all doctors know) in whom desire awoke at the same time that he opened his eyes, that his body touched its first objects and received its first pleasures. Whether it’s deliberate or unconscious, family repression forces him to unlearn what no one without such repression would ever have the need to relearn at a later time.
    The doctors will be proud of how liberal they are: they’ve dared to talk about erections, desire, intercourse, contraception to people less than fourteen years old. Yes, but that daring gesture— which waited for authorization from the State before expressing itself—is a chance for them to spread the most narrow-minded sexual morality, the most hackneyed commonplaces of petit-bourgeois coitus (desire like an “appetite” and that “is a part of love,” the “tenderness” that Dad is going to prove to Mom, the “cuddling” that he slips her to announce that he wants to get off). They even add that you “don’t just” make nookie to procreate, but they reserve that pleasure for the big people and pass quickly to something else (“And animals?”); and they certainly don’t admit that men and women fuck in perpetual fear—and not “with the hope”—of having a child. They celebrate pleasure without restrictions provided that these only depict conjugal pleasures (fucking “Mom”) and reject those that make up the entire sexuality of the child and the disinterested pleasures of the adult.
    You have to be a cynic and profoundly dishonest to call “innocence” (as religious zealots say) or “polymorphous perversion” (as psychoanalysts say) the dissymmetry that exists between the child’s sexuality and that of the adult who has been brought to heel. The latter is conceptualized, hypercoded, socialized and sermonized in excess, thinks about itself, is of two minds, assesses itself, polices itself, weighs and counts its expenditures, its roles, its appearances, its winnings and its assets. A child’s desire doesn’t conform to such parochial management; multiple and nameless, running everywhere, searching for everything, kissing everything, open and shut, grasping and wasteful, selfish and infinitely generous, all he can see in adult sexuality is an exotic, grim, incomprehensible and vaguely unsavory fable, like the entireworld of parents—its thrift, etiquettes, prisons, borders, sexual and affective baseness.
    But the child smothered by these corporal prohibitions, crushed by parental models, repudiated even in his desire (you want to come? eat some cake, at your age it’s the same thing), forced to precociously reproduce the flaws, paralyses, mutilations of the adult world, is in a weak position: he’s someone permanently under siege who, except for a very uncommon stroke of fortune, forgets himself, surrenders, becomes lost and gives in to the strongest. This is the price of his survival. Suddenly he is helpless, asexual, non-desiring, impatient for us to teach him our miserable sexuality after having stubbed out the brilliance of his—a brilliance that isn’t part of being a “child” but the feature of every man, before the order brings him down. This is the defeated child that the doctors show us with satisfaction—passive, constricted flesh ready to flow into the mould that Dad and Mom cobbled together for him under the watchful eyes of the State.
    Truth is fine, but the order is better: the former engenders freedoms that the latter condemns. It’s not difficult to imagine which side will win out. So we’ll tell children that they’re not mature enough physically to have a sex; and when they become physically mature we’ll tell them that they’re not yet psychically up to par. This is the way we pull a donkey along by a carrot until the age of about twenty, and sometimes