Children are Sexual

Puberty is not the beginning. The sexual life of the human being begins in the womb. It is expressed, enjoyed, shared, and felt in childhood. It is then repressed by those who fail to regard its existence. It is punished by those who fail to recognize its humanity. Children are instead fed fabrications about what their sexual feelings mean, and even adults begin to believe what they preach. We are told that child sexuality not only doesn't exist, but that any expression of it is deviance, and any discussion about it is the promotion of child rape. This has not always been the case, as any cursory glance will reveal from such academic works as Loving Boys (1986) by Dr. Edward Brongersma, or Paedophilia: A Factual Report (1985), by Dr. Frits Bernard, or The Sexual Life of Children (1994), by Floyd Martinson, or even The Sexual Life of the Child, from 1912, by Albert Moll, among hundreds of others lost to history.

In decades past, discussion about the sexual life of children was alive and well in fact. It was accepted as repeatedly observable in the wide breadth of scientific inquiry into human development, and discussion about it didn't lead anyone to think that by investigating child sexuality anyone was in fact promoting child rape. Times have changed though, and all progress has not only stalled, but reversed itself. The very fact of a child's sexuality has been run over by the preponderance of research dealing with child sex abuse, and now all child sexuality has become subjugated to the adult fear of child sex abuse first and foremost, rather than remain liberated as the legitimate form of inquiry it is.

The inquiry determining the difference between mental and physical sexual maturation for the purpose of procreation, and the preexisting sexual feelings that children are born with and grow up experiencing and acting upon, has been left behind with the sexual revolution of the 20th century. All other aspects of human sexuality have been greeted with toleration and eventual acceptance (and even many of the earlier sexual "perversions"), but children are not extended such courtesy, and it has everything to do with the maintenance of adult illusions. Having no conception of breathing does not stop an infant from breathing as an act of self-preservation, and neither does having no conception of sexuality stop a young child from masturbating, even at the age of seven months, for boys in particular, no matter what we tell ourselves.

But no amount of adult illusion can change the fact that children are sexual, engage in sex play, feel every bit of sexual tension and pleasure that adults do, and that all of it is denied to their understanding. No amount of telling ourselves it isn't true is going to erase the fact that decades of research has repeatedly shown children engaging in genital stimulation, auto-erotica, and even sexual activities with one another at what we in the twenty-first century have concluded are "unnaturally low" ages. On the contrary, they knew something in the 19th and 20th centuries that seems lost to us now: that the "unnaturally high" ages of sexual activity we promote in our modern "progressive" age are indeed what is more abnormal, if anything. For procreative purposes, the older ages are in fact divorced from nature, rather than any representational paradigm of it. The inability for adults to accept aging out of sexual activity in recent decades has caused them to criminalize and pathologize all youth expression of it instead, despite youth sexuality being the natural paradigm.

So we celebrate the birth of a new century where childhood sexual activity is not only stricken from all public discourse, but so is the very fact of its existence. It has been erased from both the academic landscape as well as popular opinion. Demonstrable facts have been lost and replaced by adult illusions--the illusion of the child as a wholy innocent creature devoid of feeling and depth, who is merely here to be a repository of adult services. This is the "predator panic" illusion that our society calls progress.

There is so much lack of understanding on this issue that actual child sexuality, existing as a fact of nature, has been conflated with pedophilia, and pedophilia with child sexual abuse, done through its constant repetition in research and popular culture to scare our sensitivities away from where they naturally would've been. In this way, all discussion of child sexuality as a part of a child's physical being, manifesting a great deal of their humanity, has been equated inextricably with child sexual abuse instead. "If a child is a sexual being," so goes the popular opinion, "whether sexually active or not, the child is beyond help, and more likely to be raped or sexually exploited." But since every child is sexual by nature, expressing it to varying degrees, and child sex abuse is still a relative rarity by comparison, this is hardly an appropriate conclusion.

Adults attempt to eradicate the existence of a child's sexuality so as to protect them from themselves as well as predators, and make deviant a child's natural sexual exploratory behavior all as the price for protection against those who are truly deviant. So the only image we are fed is that of the child as a porcelain doll who feels not, thinks not, and perhaps only breathes so that in life they may give adults something to protect. In this way, a child's humanity has been taken away every time their human drives are equated with deviance. It seems the western world has no problem with stripping the humanity off a child though, just so long as the boy or girl keeps their clothes on for it.