Songs of Innocence and Experience
A recent Penny Arcade comic asked a question that comes to me once in a while.
Pictures of naked women used to be somewhat hard to come by. When I was a kid, we would occasionally find an adult magazine which would be quickly passed among the neighborhood kids. The magazine became a deliciously forbidden sacrament for a spontaneous cabal of children learning what it was to be sexually aroused. The shame of our society inflamed our desire in a heady cocktail of sex, guilt, and danger. We would each partake, constantly vigilant to prevent the infidel grownups from desecrating our secret explorations.
Twice in my young life we found treasure troves of nudity: once we found our neighbor’s huge porn stash in his backyard; another time I rescued a trash bag full of 1970s era Playboy magazines from imminent disposal. Through all the guilt of our naughty behavior, we cherished those magazines. We hid them carefully where no grownup was likely to ever go: in the disused, unkempt corners of our neighborhood only the children paid attention to. Every once in a while, we would furtively visit our caches with glances over our shoulders to enjoy the urgency of desire. We were careful because we knew it might be years before we found another opportunity like these.
At other times, we would turn our explorations on each other. Thick bushes provided a place to play “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours”. I first saw a naked, in-the-flesh girl (who wasn’t a member of my family) in those bushes. A vacant house provided a chance to play strip tag. The rules were simple: if the person who is “it” touched a piece of your clothing, you had to take it off. I saw my first naked, in-the-flesh, postpubescent girl in that vacant house.
All of this before I was ten years old, knew what “horny” meant, or had discovered masturbation.
The point is that I remember these incidents vividly and fondly because they were 1) forbidden and 2) rare.
Not so anymore. You have to work hard to avoid seeing five vaginae before lunch. I mean people are giving the stuff away for free. I wonder whether the relative ease of getting porn is better or worse.
Would I have preferred a childhood where it was easy to see naked women?
Tags: nudity, pornography, sexuality
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May 8, 2008 @ 3:27 pm
I think these vacant lots and buildings with their innocent discoveries of knowlege are stil out there. Maybe no less than before, just in different places. Interestingly, your childhood context was very similar to mine. I grew-up around apartments and open lots and vacant buildings in South Salt Lake. Garbage cans were treasure chests. An abandon van was a strip-show stage. Show me yours was part of getting to know the girl next door. Sweet, exciting, and subversive memories wrapped in a fog of shame. This post has lifted some of the fog. Well done.
My children don’t have the same type of neighborhood. Their experince will be different. The cleared cache and history folder are tell-tell signs. There’s no way that our children will be denied the magical mystery tour.
BEEHIVE said,
May 8, 2008 @ 3:28 pm
Wow, you started young. So I would guess that you do not believe that your childhood was briskly taken away?
May 8, 2008 @ 4:07 pm
Matt,
Magical mystery tour: I like that. It certainly was a wild, mysterious ride.
It will be different for our children but perhaps more isolated? I wonder what it will be like for them.
BEEHIVE,
I resented how I learned about sex until recently. I thought that my childhood had been ruined by the porn and the experimentation. If only I hadn’t been exposed, I imagined that I could have spent my childhood in proper innocence.
Now I see this all as part of being a child. Many adults don’t like to imagine that children are naturally sexually aware and interested. I constantly heard that I wasn’t supposed to be interested in girls until I was much older, but I can remember being sexually aroused as early as kindergarten (and probably a little earlier) and actively fantasizing at least by second grade.
How and when is different for everyone. I don’t know if it would have been healthier if I had been older before giving expression to my nascent sexuality. Perhaps I was damaged somehow by it, but it doesn’t feel like it anymore. I would go so far as to say I cherish those early experiences.
May 8, 2008 @ 4:13 pm
I must add that I think this exploration was OK because we were all children. I’m not OK with the idea of adults actively participating in these explorations (otherwise known as sexual molestation). I also don’t think it’s OK for adults to dress their little girls in adult-style clothing.
It sounds like I’m a little conflicted.
Lacey said,
May 8, 2008 @ 9:18 pm
I don’t remember where the conversation or it was in a blog I read about Japan or China, where there is a lot of porn everywhere and no one cares to cover it up. Like men will look at porn on the subway with woman and children standing around. Prostitution is everywhere and you can get it with someone of any age. Anyways it was a thought that the young men in that society didn’t give any respect to woman and were often cold and harsh, or something to the like. So the young woman were frustrated by them and often hit on the American missionaries, because they were respectful to woman.
I guess the point was having such a sexual society had made the men less attractive to real woman, and less respectful.
I really wish I could remember where I heard or read this. I don’t think it was a figment of my imagination anyways.
May 9, 2008 @ 5:17 am
I believe you’re remembering Seth R.’s comment at fMh, though he didn’t mention anything about prostitution. I think the forbiddenness of sex was a secret sauce that made it exciting. Perhaps Japanese culture was too open with it. Then again, perhaps we’re seeing this from an American culture that is obsessed with sex which would make a less obsessed culture seem disinterested.
Also, it seems like Japanese culture is very stressful. I know that when I’m stressed I’m less interested in sex.
It’s hard to know for sure what’s at the root of this or if this is a valid judgment.
BEEHIVE said,
May 9, 2008 @ 8:25 am
Yes, I would agree that children are curious, but I do think that they should hold off their curiostiy until they are older. We have our entire adult lives for exploration. I also agree that encouraging by participating, or improper dressing can have a negative effect on children.
May 9, 2008 @ 6:02 pm
I really don’t think that availability of porn is the reason that Japanese culture has a misogynistic bent. That’s been around a lot longer than the nudie mags.
Seth R. said,
May 9, 2008 @ 7:01 pm
Good point about the stress Jonathan. It’s worth linking to the article one of the other commenters referenced that got me thinking about the topic:
http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/trends/n_9437/
I will say, it’s not a happy place our culture is going on this issue. I very firmly believe that. Whether you think the suppression approach of the LDS and others is healthy or not, it is not a happy place the porn culture is taking us.
I’d also recommend the feminist book “Pornography and Silence.” Rather chilling book.
May 10, 2008 @ 9:10 pm
Gosh, this post reminds me of my own sexual fantasies as young as five and six. I was hideously ashamed of them, and confessed to my mom (because that’s what one does to repent, no?). And yet, they were still so exhilarating. I’m hoping to strike a balance with my own kids.
On the dressing of children as adults, isn’t that what we’ve been doing for decades (maybe even a century or two)? Maybe you could clarify for me. I did a couple of posts on my blog about clothes and child sexuality (the latter of which was re-posted on fMh). They are indeed difficult issues.
May 13, 2008 @ 10:53 am
I was pretty ashamed of my own fantasies too. Actually, now that I think about it, I was ashamed of them until maybe two years ago.
shakes head
Regarding sexual clothing (sorry for the late reply, BTW), for example I mean dressing your first-grader in low-rise jeans or otherwise making them a sexual object à la JonBenét Ramsey.
May 13, 2008 @ 12:53 pm
what, it bothers you when 2-year-old girls are dressed in bikinis? why on earth would such a thing be offensive?
this was an interesting post that got me thinking about my own childhood…and my children. show me yours was indeed a fond game in childhood. i also remember masturbating at…3? 4? clumsy, and silly, but children are intensely sensual creatures who seek pleasure. i found my dad’s porn cache at 11 or 12 and invited my girlfriends over for a porn-fest. then we took off our clothes and compared development. it’s not discussed much but the few times i’ve ventured to bring up these issues, they do seem to be pretty common experiences. children are sexual and they experiment with pleasure. they’re also fascinated with their bodies and the bodies of others. it’s normal. my children are 3 and 18 months. my son knows all the proper words for parts and he uses them freely. he plays with his penis whenever it’s available and when i change my daughter, she touches her labia and clitoris. it’s especially funny when she bends over to try to see what’s down there. that makes me crack up every time. we just acknowledge it: “yep, that’s your vulva, that’s brother’s penis, those are my breasts,” etc. it doesn’t need to be smothered or celebrated; it just is.
i agree, raunch culture is a problem. i wonder how i’ll raise my children with healthy attitudes about sexuality and acceptance of conservative experimentation against the culture that teaches certain things about men, women, bodies and sex. it’s depressing to consider it.
May 13, 2008 @ 1:53 pm
Chandelle, are you being ironic again?
Now that you mention it, I did stumble on a clumsy form of masturbation before I was ten years old. I noticed that if I ran a certain way all the right bits would get rubbed just the right way and it would feel really good. That was probably somewhere around seven or eight years old.
We try to stick to real words for anatomy, too.