Revolving Rights
By Taylor W.Howes
With help from "Best of love" at the niklas chat room

Heterosexual
Homosexual
Bisexual
Transexual
Transgender
Pedophile
Child Molester
Child Abuser
Boy lover
Girl lover
Sexual Deviant

Titles, Lables, StereoTypes, Minoritys, Majoritys, from the Assumed, to the Feared, to the Hated.

But what are thay realy?

To answer this question We have take a look at how we think and why it is we think the way we do. what we know about these issues come from how often they are talked about and nothing is talked about less then what the Majority deems "Sexualy Deviant" and to the majority there is nothing more deviant as childhood sexuality.
In discussing childhood sexuality, age of consent, and "child sexual abuse", there are three areas to be addressed: the legal, the moral, and the psychological. In this Essey, I'd like to examine the moral or ethical background which has given rise to our legislation.

The rules governing our sexual politics are grounded in the notion of "sin" - a concept (especially in relation to sex) which, itself, has undergone considerable evolution over the ages. In Graeco-Roman times and in the Renaissance, youth (and erotic images of youth) were revered. In Athens and under the Borgia popes, adolescents were prized sexual objects. Throughout history - and even today in some rural areas - non-aristocratic families often lived in small dwellings with one bedroom. Entire families often shared a singel bed. Children in such circumstances were clearly not unaware of sex.

From the seventeenth century, though, the moral claim became absolute - regarding all sex acts. This arose, in large part, due to Renaissance and, worse, Enlightenment concepts of the individual - and the humanist notion of individual freedom and responsibility. (Hence, even the etymology of "Romeo and Juliet laws".) Such freedom was a necessarily secular notion which threatened the hegemony of the Church as the Age of Reason collided with the Age of Faith. Seeing "self-knowledge" as a potential threat to her authority, the Church, for the first time, began focussing on the most intimate sins in earnest. It is no coincidence that Pope Gregory would soon decry the "depravity" of "the shameless lovers of liberty".

Sexual sins were against God's law and were to be punished not only by the Creator, but by the church, the state and the community. No proof of evil consequence was needed - it was enough that any form of non-procreative sex was sinful.

In the nineteenth century, the perspective changed somewhat. Violations of the sexual norm were now believed to cause severe medical problems. Masturbation and even nocturnal emission were deemed deleterious to mental and physical health - they could lead to pimples, impotence, and insanity. Sexual indulgence outside marriage was not only "evil", it could sap one's energy and lead to memory loss, consumption (tuberculosis), and death.

In the twentieth century, the notion of psychological harm entered the discussion. No sooner did Freud demonstrate that childhood sexuality existed at all, that it was used to assume the potential for mental damage. None of the medical arguments since the end of the Renaissance were actually the reason for sex acts to be condemned (and, clearly, there was never any evidence that extramarital sex lead to death any more than masturbation lead to blindness) - such damage was simply seen as the secularized retribution for sinful acts. "Harm" was seen as a result of "sin" and such claims were based on faith rather than scientific investigation. In terms of psychological harm, this is still the case in some instances.

Assumptions about sexuality lead to many other prejudices. In the nineteenth century, women were considered pure and angelic as a rule. Initially, it was argued that innately evil women seduced men and destroyed their moral purity. With the rise of feminism in the late nineteenth century, women themselves, it ws argued, became the victims of the patriarchy: if women were immoral, it was not a sign of desire, but evidence that they had been corrupted. This gave rise to the white slavery panic - and age of consent legislation. Consent laws rested on the belief that men initiated unwitting (and unwilling) women into sexual activity which lead to prostituion. These laws were to prevent men from recruiting their youngest victims. Even then, the age of consent 150 years ago was twelve in New York - and many were still marrying at that age. By the turn of the century, the age had risen to sixteen.

(The argument, by the way, that the marriage of twelve-year-olds was once acceptable because of shorter life expectancies assumes that increased longevity has somehow also produced a stunted growth rate - that twelve-year-olds now are less "mature" than they were then. This social devolution, like much else relating to childhood sexuality, has no empirical evidence to back it up. It even contradicts the "common sense" arguments so favored by child advocates - if approached without prejudice.)

Similarly, white women, by definition, could not be attracted to black men. Any relationship between white women and black men (who innately lusted after the corruptibly pale skin) was evidence of force. This assumption was one of the major justifications for the Jim Crow laws and the lynchings which frequently accompanied them.

Such moral assumptions die hard. There are still many who believe the racist mythology of predatory black bucks, many who find birth control evil on the grounds that it bypasses the mandate for procreative sex. In the 1950s, Sen. McCarthy presented the then apparently convincing argument that homosexuals in the State Department lead to an "effeminate" foreign policy. Sexual politics have tended to be over-determined, used to control sectors of the population: women, racial minorities, homosexuals - and children.

The tradition of such politics is that anyone who questions the received wisdom is met with moral outrage: "nigger lovers" who questioned the proclivities of black men, "wanton" feminists who questioned gender-defined roles (many are still characterized as "man-hating dykes"), "depraved pornographers" who questioned the moral code of the Comstock laws, "promiscuous, disease-spreading, youth-corrupting faggots" who argued for gay liberation - and "defenders of pedophilia" who argue that children are sexual beings.

You'll note that only one of the above is still in the present tense. Children are the last vestige of the old sexual morality. The assertion that children (like Victorian women) are asexual angels - and that, in the sexual arena, they are passive and incapable of consent - is considered true by definition. It is the only area of human sexuality in which assumptions are still widely maintained without any scientific evidence to back them up (indeed, with much evidence to the contrary).

In all other arenas, we try to prepare children for adulthood from an early age. We give them allowances and even savings accounts to socialize them into our economic system; we train them for sports and self-defense; we send them to Sunday School to indoctrinate them into our religions; we teach them hunting and fishing, encourage participation in domestic chores; we encourage play with dolls for future parenting skills; many of us here probably work to acquaint them with our political system - yet we completely exclude them from our sexual system. Worse, when we address sex at all, it is almost entirely in the negative: we discourage masturbation, punish sex play if discovered - even our so-called sex education as late as high school focuses on the dangers of sex and preaches abstinence.

The exclusion of sex from our children's lives - they should not see it, they should not hear of it, they should not speaek of it - God knows they should not do it - is based on the current moral argument of the majority. And such moral positions tend to be absolutist and not very open to challenge - especially when supported by the law.

The questions here are: Why do we see our moral notions regarding childhood sexuality as more valid than many of our discarded notions about the women and desire, racial proclivities, birth control, and homosexuality? Should such moral notions be the unquestioned basis for legislation? Do you see a time when, as a society, we might become more realistic about the evidence surrounding childhood sexualtiy? And, if so, do you see that as having any impact on, for example, age of consent laws?

In our progress through Time, Science, and Religion we have become so over protective and fearfull that we are no longer able to see our children as anything other then our pets that we must keep from changing Untill thay are old enough to marry and pass on the family name.
Its not enough that we control most every aspect of there lives, but now when we get even a tiny hint of free thinking that happens to differ from what the parents deem "moraly right" we shun and punish it in the thinking that who on earth could know a childs body, mind, and soul better then the parent.
In all of man kinds progress and growth there is nothing so disturbing and wrong as the belief in the "Mother knows best" theory.

The next step down the line is for the parents of the world to live with the Idea that maybe, just maybe there are some things about there children that only the children can ever fully understand about themselfs and that all we can do is try and help them come to that understanding by simply being there as an open, loving, and supporting sorce of uncenserd information.

"...the problem is not so much that your children may be fondled or fiddled with. This is distasteful in our society, although in some others it is S.O.P. - Standard Operating Procedure. Practically all children "play with themselves" and with each other, more often then not. You (and certainly I) probably can recall incidents of this kind in the dim, dark past of our own childhood which did not have serious, untoward effects. Research reveals that a large majority of adults recall such events in their own lives.
An adult approach to a child is much more complicated, of course, but even here there are some indications that children may not be as disturbed by the actual sex play as they are by the surrounding reactions of other adults."
-Wardall Pomeroy


  Thank you for reading
          Revolving Rights
            By Taylor W. Howes

    Special thanks to
     My Editor "Best of love" at the niklas chat rooms
        My good friend Bre
          And my boyfriend Eric A. Lane