The Sweetest Taboo
If you want a right-winger to foam at the mouth,
talk about better sex education for children.
Add a comment about teenage sexuality and how it
should be encouraged. You’ll probably be lynched.
ALEX JONES (HOST): Chances are, if you’re looking at five
Catholic priests, two or three of them are pedophiles now.
And again, it’s other major institutions: It’s public schools,
it’s colleges, it’s Protestant groups, it’s the liberals, the left.
If I criticize the LGBTP community — I add
the pedophile thing on the end because now
NABLA [North American Man/Boy Love Association]
is a part of that and they promote it.
I’m now anti-gay if I say, “Don’t have access to kids.
Don’t sexualize kids.” I don’t care if it’s
heterosexual, homosexual, don’t go into schools
and talk about sex with kids when they’re five years old.
Clearly there’s an obsession in this global
cult with children. Who runs it? Who is it?
There is a class of people in America today, numbering
two million or more, who have been utterly scapegoated,
ostracized, demonized and shunned.
The key ingredients of this scapegoating
campaign are of course sex and children.
In some circles, the term pedophile is now
used to put down any older person who has
an affair or shows interest in younger people.
35-year-olds, for instance, who “prey on” 20-year olds.
By the early 2000s, pedophile had morphed into the broader
term sex offender with even mainstream media free to refer
to the feared and hated class as ‘pervs, and and ‘deviants’.
The obsession with pedophiles comes from
the reluctance to confront incest and the rampant
sexualization of children in American culture.
Adults project the eroticized desire outwards, creating
a monster to hate, hunt down and destroy.
The ‘victims’ of the evil perpetrators must also
be protected and projected as the spotless mirror
image of their violators.
Their purity and innocence must always be
asserted despite post-Freudian analysis of
sexuality in children.
Anything portraying the physical beauty or
erotic aspects of their lives must be banned.
Children Are Sexual Animals
Nonsense, said conservatives. To critics of sex education, childhood was a time of sexual innocence. Racy movies, TV shows and magazines made kids prematurely interested in sex.
So did sex education, which robbed them of their natural virtue and replaced it with tawdry thoughts and feelings.
During the House debate last week over a bill that would ban almost all abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy a republican claimed fetuses not only experience sexual arousal but they actively arouse themselves.
“Watch a sonogram of a 15-week baby, and they have movements that are purposeful. If they’re a male baby, they may have their hand between their legs. If they feel pleasure, why is it so hard to believe that they could feel pain?”
The Sexuality of Children
Liberal commentators and late-night comedians pounced on his remarks, which are just the latest salvo in America’s long-running culture war over abortion.
But they also signaled a truce in an even older cultural conflict, about sexuality itself. After denying childhood sexual feelings for nearly a century, conservatives are starting to acknowledge them. And that’s good news for anyone who cares about the sex education of our young.
Sex education began in the early 1900s, when outbreaks of venereal disease in urban centers spawned brief schoolhouse lessons on the need for chastity.
In 1985, the founder of modern American sex education, Mary Calderone, claimed new evidence about arousal in male fetuses demonstrated once and for all that children were sexual beings.
But to outraged foes of the new subject, especially Catholics, any mention of sex in school would make students too interested in it.
“Children didn’t have a natural curiosity” about sex. Instead, sex education provided a strong artificial stimulus.
“Students are to have thrust upon their innocent, childish consciousness subjects much too deep and far reaching for their understanding.”
By the 1960s conservatives stepped up their resistance as well. “The program is taking their childhood away. The third-graders went in to see a movie on birth and came out adults.”
Conservative critics reserved special ire for schoolhouse discussions of masturbation, which allegedly led to sexual abuse. Teaching about masturbation acknowledged that children had sexual desires, the argument went, which in turn encouraged pedophiles to exploit those same feelings.
But the Right has reappraised these issues. You’ll find a frank admission that children are sexual creatures, even in the womb. And the way we know that is simple: fetuses masturbate.
They probably don’t, as it turns out, at least not at 15 weeks after pregnancy. In 1996, two Italian doctors published a paper describing a female fetus supposedly masturbating for 20 minutes. But that fetus was 32 weeks old.
Republicans bring this up in an effort to restrict abortion rights, not to underscore childhood sexuality.
But the effect is the same, and that’s what matters. America will never have real sex education until we admit that our kids are sexual themselves.
A paradigm change must occur in our vision of children as as innocent lambs led to the slaughter by sex educators. Children are sexual animals. The sooner we face it, the more open we can be about childhood desire.