A Brief examination of Societal Issues
Surrounding the Censorship of Sex

The complaint is that the book [Understanding Loved Boys and Boylovers] encourages child molestation.

Which complaint is almost certainly an egregious piece of bovine scatology, but I haven't read that book. However, ultra-right wing nuts said the same thing about Judith Levine's Harmful To Minors, and when I read that book there was nothing in it to suggest adults should have sex with children; although she did allow that adults having sex with adolescents[1] was not necessarily a bad thing. The crux of that particular issue, of course, is how loosely or vaguely you define the term children. For legal purposes, a child is any person under the age of seventeen years, three hundred sixty five days -- in many jurisdictions. In some legal regions it might vary by one to three years[2].

However, where this might suffice for jurisprudence, it does not suffice for biological purposes. For my money, a person should no longer be recognized as a child from the onset of menses for girls, and the start of nocturnal emissions for boys[3]. The current situation is one of artificial constraints that fail to respect four million years of human evolution and neotony, and forty thousand years of civilized society. What results from the first condition is the fraudulent religious-society attitude that children are not sexual creatures and have no capacity to make self-determinations about their own sexuality, and that adolescents are still children rather than young adults -- and from the second condition a distinct lack of both intellectual and emotional maturity[4].

In my not so humble opinion, both states of affairs have very serious real-world fallout. I believe that both are direct contributors to adolescent crime and adolescent suicides, and which stem from a sociological condition called acculturation wherein a person feels totally cut off from society. In the young, it is sometimes referred to as adolescent angst or an identity crisis. In a worst case scenario, acculturation can lead to despair, which I think is a necessary precondition to suicide[5]. I believe that the best current example of this worst case scenario is the incidence of gas-sniffing among the Innu people of Davis Inlet, Labrador, and the disproportionately high rate of adolescent suicides among Canadian Amerindian peoples. In their case, the acculturation is due to not fitting in to caucasian, technologized society, while no longer having the earth-based society we have displaced and destroyed[6].

Our present social state derives from the Victorian idea that children have a right to childhood[7]; which should be a period of carefreeness and play; devoid of worries or responsibilities. Unfortunately, the concomittant to responsibility is authority. In pre-Victorian times, a child started doing adult work around the house, the farm, or the manor stables at about the age of seven. By the time such a child was thirteen, she or he had all the training needed to function independently in such milieus and was considered an adult; ready for marriage, procreation, and to take his or her place in society. Which is the purpose of neotony -- that period of growth and learning from birth to adulthood -- and which was fine, for an agrarian society. But then came the industrial revolution and we moved beyond agrarianism and into industrialized society. More heavily populated, more bustling, more material and economy intensive; thoroughly unsuited for the social psyche of the herd animal we still basically are.

And on top of this, young adults in industrialized societies are forced to remain children for five years more than we evolved for, in large part because of the societal requirement for "childhood".

Moreover, this artificial constraint is made even more burdensome by societal attempts to suppress sexual nature; attempts that are essentially based on the circular logic: As children, they cannot possibly know anything about sex, therefore they must be protected from knowing anything about sex because they are children. There are three factors this premise ignores, however: despite being children, they are not stupid, merely largely uninformed; children will not remain children, they will grow up physically (meaning sexually as well), despite all efforts to keep them from growing up intellectually and emotionally; the purpose of childhood in the first place is to learn what we don't know but must know to function as adults.

The point of this whole circumlocution is that raving fools with an axe to grind are going to condemn everything dealing with human sexuality as obscene, offensive, or -- in the case of books dealing with infantile and adolsescent sexuality -- as promoting child molestation. The way the ultra-right savaged Harmful To Minors, and the way various groups continue to savage Robie Harris's two works as obscene, are the proof in that pudding.

There is a pretty decent chance that Understanding Loved Boys and Boylovers does in fact encourage real child molestation. The only way to find out is to read it and subject the content and presentation to a critical review. Of course, just as I haven't read that book, it's a safe bet those detractors haven't read it either. The censors of the ultra-right hadn't read Harmful To Minors before judging that as promoting pedophilia.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The religious right denounces any person age twenty or more who has sex with a teenager as a pedophile, even though the teenager might be a legal adult (18-19). The real problem for them is not with older people, almost invariably male, taking an adolescent (13-18) of the age of consent as a sexual partner, but that anyone is having unsanctioned sex of any sort.
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[2] In ultra-conservatism, of course, any sex before or outside marriage is strictly forbidden for all people regardless of age.
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[3] Pubesence; the onset of puberty.
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[4] These difficulties and one sexual problem they cause are exquisitely detailed in:

The Myth of Maturity: What Teenagers Need from Parents to Become Adults
Terri Apter -2001
ISBN 0-393-32317-X
Dewey # 306.8742 A655M

However, in Harmful To Minors, Ms. Levine mentions a longitudinal study of 30,000 Americans over the course of thirty years. This study found that the majority of Americans never learn how to function intellectually or emotionally, beyond the level of a sixteen year old. I have no idea whether or not this derives from some kind of evolutionary hard wiring or whether it derives from the social conditions created by the concept of childhood and its imposition on industrialized society. The upshot of it is, most people, male and female, simply never "grow up". Sixteen is as good as it gets. Perhaps because sixteen is as good as it can get. If so, then being still treated like a six year old at sixteen will only increase the psychological pressures an adolescent feels, who is already as emotionally mature as he can become.
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[5] However, as of this writing, 11 Oct 2002, I had not yet done an indepth study into suicide in general; only for the terminally ill. I also think that a second sociological condition, anomie, plays a large part in the commission of crimes. But the jury is still out on that one.
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[6] No, you knee-jerk reactionary, foaming at the mouth lunatic, that is not a Politically Incorrect, anti white-bashing judgement. It is merely a statement of fact.
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[7] Which concept was derived from the same premise the religious right invokes today: We must protect the children. However, in the mid-19th century the concern was a very real one and it stemmed from a desire to protect children from physical harm. At the start of the industrial revolution every factory was a sweatshop and there were no safety regulations. Children as young as seven, because of their small size, were often hired to clean up under machinery and to clean the machinery itself; while the machine was still in operation. The premise of protecting children today is based on the misapprehension of psychic harm from the abstractions of knowledge and information.

Mind you, some religionists will stoutly maintain that the suppression of knowledge of and information about sex as concerns children is to protect children from sexual molestation. There are enough flaws in that single premise on its own for an entire rant, and sex in and of itself is neither harmful physically or psychicly.
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