These abilities should not be taken for granted, and nor is empathy an absolute good: the more the better. In some cases there is oversensitivity when confronted with another person’s emotions, leading to incapacitating personal distress in the observer. Or a person who overreacts with personal distress may be motivated to relieve his own distress rather than help another person. In Autism Spectrum Disorders there is sometimes an oversensitivity to others that is overwhelming and leads to a shutting down of empathic response, and dysfunction in interpersonal relations.

The physiological components of empathic feelings and behavior are very complex and not yet clearly understood. Some research has found that people who are overwhelmed by their own feeling of distress are not likely to provide help to others. Other research has found a relationship between personal distress and the negative emotion of anger, and anger is associated with a decrease in perspective-taking. There is “evidence that parents at high risk of abusing a child are the ones who more frequently report distress at seeing an infant cry” (1).

When a parent discovers that a child has a serious disease, the parent sometimes “identifies” with the child’s suffering. The parent feels and behaves as if the parent has the disease too. That is the same way an infant reacts to a caregiver’s distress, and is inappropriate for an adult the child is dependent on for care and protection. The last person in the world a seriously ill child needs is a parent who behaves as though he is seriously ill too. Over-identification has been likened to an infantile blurring of boundaries.

Parents sometimes claim “I know my child,” and therefore are more competent than anyone else to make decisions for the child’s benefit. Although that is certainly true in many cases, it is also true that a child’s personality is sometimes very different depending on where he is and who he is with. The child a parent “knows” at home with his family is not always the same child in school with his teachers or with his friends in the playground. Some parents have never witnessed their child’s creativity and resourcefulness when interacting with others he is not dependent on.

In very early childhood some individuals already demonstrate an understanding of other people’s emotional states, the moral quality of acts (right or wrong), and respond in ways that attempt to comfort another person who appears in distress. Children want to feel strong, competent, and autonomous, and they deserve recognition of their competence. How many children would ever say: “Thanks, Mom! I appreciate you making me feel dependent, incompetent, helpless and defenseless”?

Granted, it’s easy for me to criticize parents because I only have to deal with children a few hours a day. I am never forced to lose sleep because of a sick child. That doesn’t mean parents are above criticism; it means that parents deserve comprehension.

In healthy individuals empathy is improved through learning, and increases with experience and age. A way to improve children’s empathy is to give them challenging duties and responsibilities such as managing other children. I allow pupils to take turns every day acting as “assistant teacher,” a privilege they value highly and are willing to work for. Conversely, passivity and isolation impair the development of normal empathy.

We should recognize that the capacity for empathy isn’t unlimited even in normally empathic individuals. The further away someone is, in time or space, the more difficult it is to feel appropriate empathy. That is one reason why children prefer their own company: it’s easier for children to feel empathy for each other.

There is also some evidence that receiving empathy makes the recipients behave more pro-socially. Conversely, not receiving accurate empathy may have an even greater, negative, impact on interpersonal behavior. There is evidence that adults often misjudge the pain of other adults (underestimating or overestimating), let alone children. For that reason some parents, teachers or other rare adults who can feel accurate empathy for little people very far from their own age, are especially valuable to children and their community.

In contrast, some individuals never develop normal empathy. The heartless psychopath is the classic case. A healthy adult perceives a child’s distress and feels a desire to stop the source of the distress. But a psychopath does not perceive a child’s distress, or is not inhibited by it, or may even feel pleasure when witnessing distress. A child’s distress is not aversive to the psychopath.

Some sex offenders against children (SOAC) lack empathy for children as well as the parents. An SOAC fails to anticipate the sometimes negative reaction of the child to abusive behavior, and the sometimes ferocious reaction of the parents or other adults when they find out. Many SOACs are the parents themselves.

Some prudish parents lack empathy for children too, as when a child innocently reports a positive or neutral experience of sex play, but the parent insists on a dramatic public scandal, criminal prosecution, or family break-up to satisfy the parent’s own desire for vengeance – which is unwanted by the child and may not be in the child’s best interest. Such parents and other “concerned” adults add to the child’s distress, rather than alleviating it. An adult who is very upset may fail to predict the negative consequences to the child of the adult’s own overreaction.

Some parents and other adults had no sexual experience or only negative sexual experience when they were young, and have been misinformed about the supposed “trauma” of early sexual experience by mass hysteria spread by the sex abuse rescue business. So some adults mistakenly assume that all sexual experience between different age groups “must be” negative, and hence tend to over-protect children.

When a case of child sexual abuse is discovered the parent or other first responder’s rage interferes with their ability to identify the child’s sometimes neutral or positive reaction. I think that in some cases the parents or other adults are horrified precisely because the child did not react negatively as they expected she “should have.”

One foster parent described with horror that her foster child (who had been taken away from the biological mother due to sexual abuse) frequently exhibited an obvious desire to be sexually stimulated. The foster parent was not horrified at the child’s behavior due to empathy; the foster parent was horrified because she failed to empathize with the child’s desire for sex play. We should feel profound empathy for the child’s horror in being forcibly separated from her parent.

It is not surprising if an adult who has been exposed to the hysterical propaganda against early sex play may panic when finding out a child has experienced sexual abuse. But empathy that is accurate (appropriate) necessitates calm as well as the recognition of differences between a child’s and adult’s mindset. A child who has not been exposed to the same anti-sex information directed at adults, may not react with the same panic. An individual child’s values may be very different from an adult’s values, and a child’s initial reaction to an experience depends on the child’s values not the adult’s values.

It is known that stress is inversely correlated with one’s sense of control, and self-esteem correlates with having a choice in decision-making. Does an abuser give the child a choice in the abuse? After discovery, does the parent give the child a choice in what happens next? A child’s sanity is not cultivated when an insensitive abuser ignores the child’s preferences, and then the enraged parent ignores the child’s preferences as well.

Healthy empathy is characterized by a humble awareness of your own limitations, and an effort to learn as much as possible about the unique external context in each individual case, and the particular child’s point of view, rather than recklessly assume you know everything instantly, and then react selfishly to satisfy your own emotional needs or personal interests.

Children’s feelings do not occur in isolation but in a bodily context. Empathic understanding requires not only listening to children’s words and seeing their facial expressions, but also perceiving what the child’s body is expressing. When a child presses her knee or foot against a man’s groin, she is obviously motivated by curiosity, not an intention to sexually stimulate the adult.

But the soft pressure reflexively causes the healthy male to become erect. Neither the child’s action nor the adult’s reflexive reaction is abnormal, unnatural or unhealthy. Analogously, some mothers report genital erection and even orgasm during breast-feeding.

Empathy entails a letting go of inhibition. The child has active mirror neurons that may foster mimicry and she may become erect too. Or her clitoris may have already been erect. If the child expresses a desire to engage in innocent sex play in an appropriate context and with respect of safe limits, the empathic adult validates the child’s normal and healthy curiosity. What normally happens between a healthy adult and child is embodied cognition and embodied empathy.

Physiological research supports the view that people tend to mimic the facial expressions and bodily state (e.g. heart rate and electrodermal activity) observed in another person. Studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging suggest that mirror neuron networks are activated during empathy, and not merely in motor mimicry (2).

Some experiments using F18-fluorodeoxyglucose in Positron Emission Tomography support a model of empathy in which both cognitive empathy and affective empathy networks are activated in the brain (3). If that model is correct, then emotion needs to be controlled to avoid interfering with cognition. An adult in the grip of an intense, negative emotion is not likely to behave empathically toward a child.

Ideally, empathic attunement and resonance between a child and adult include these steps: 1) the child expresses her feelings in some way, 2) the adult perceives what the child is feeling, and tries to understand, 3) the adult communicates his tentative understanding to the child, and asks if the adult’s interpretation is correct, 4) the child feels understood, and 5) the child expresses her awareness that her feelings are being accurately understood.

In patients with certain kinds of brain damage, some research has found that impairment in cognitive flexibility is associated with impairment in empathy. Some adults, especially those individuals who are sexually dysfunctional, enviously resent and disapprove of any form of sex play that may include genital erection even passively and incidentally. But responsible caregiving requires empathy, and empathy entails flexibility; adults who are rigid and unable to let go of their own inhibition are not empathic.

Complex pro-social behavior (including mating, reproductive and parenting behavior) depends on flexibility in turning off defensive and stress mechanisms when they are inappropriate. Some individuals who have been mentally castrated and are sexually dysfunctional have never learned to view sexuality as non-threatening. Such individuals are not good models for children’s healthy development.

Boys and girls are naturally curious about sexuality and have a healthy desire to seek pleasure. Denying a child’s natural and healthy tendencies sets the child up for a sense of failure and toxic self-reproach. Empathy requires opening up to the child’s sensations, and being perceptive to what is important to the child at the moment. Children at every age need and deserve empathic understanding and empathic resonance. That is how healthy adult models help children learn to become more empathic.

References
1. Decety, Jean and Ickes, William (eds.) The Social Neuroscience of Empathy. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. 2009. Most of my references to evidence are cited in this book.
2. Schulte-Ruther, M., et al. (2007). Mirror neuron and theory of mind mechanisms involved in face-to-face interactions: An fMRI approach to empathy. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 19, 54-72. Cited in Decety.
3. Shamay-Tsoory, S.G., et al. (2005). The neural correlates of understanding the other: a PET investigation of empathic accuracy. NeuroImage, 27, 468-472. Cited in Decety.

In her study of adolescent girls’ experience of sexual desire, Deborah L. Tolman reports how 30 normal adolescent girls were typically reluctant or unable to describe their own sexual desire. Half of the subjects the author invited to participate in the study declined the invitation (1).

A 17-year-old girl reports that her first sexual experience wasn’t planned but “just happened.” She says “He was kissing me,” not “We were kissing,” or “I was kissing him.” Some of the girls seem very confused, or perhaps they were deliberately trying to deceive the interviewer. One girl was asked if she felt sad, and with tears rolling down her face she replied “Umm…I don’t know.” Another girl reports “Well, I don’t really know what I’m thinking.”

The author interprets the girls’ statements as evidence that they are uncomfortable about the subject of sexual desire and need guidance. Ms. Tolman says many things that no reasonable person can dispute:

1. Sexuality is important throughout life and sexual desire is life-sustaining.
2. There is a strong cultural taboo against girls having and expressing sexual desire.
3. Young girls are capable (theoretically) of strong sexual desire.
4. Girls are morally entitled to experience sexual pleasure no less than boys.
5. Girls are being cruelly cheated by traditional beliefs and rules about what is “proper” for girls.

A girl is expected to appear seductive: she is supposed to stimulate a boy’s sexual desire, but she isn’t supposed to have any sexual desire of her own. Good girls are only supposed to desire emotional relationships. Good girls are desexualized and disembodied. Rarely does a young girl admit: “I want to have sex.” A girl saying that publicly is considered pornography.

Some adults claim they merely want to “protect” girls from the risk of negative outcomes. But the author notes if that were true then girls would be encouraged to engage in self-masturbation or mutual masturbation to avoid infectious disease and unplanned pregnancy. In reality female sexual desire itself is popularly considered the monstrous “danger.”

Amazingly, none of the girls in the book ever mentions the clitoris or clitoral erection, and neither does the author call attention to that glaring omission. The girls do frequently report faking sexual pleasure. The author says that some of the girls have “silent bodies,” but she avoids discussing the possibility that many of the girls may actually be sexually dysfunctional and lack sexual desire. Some of the sexually active girls admit they don’t have orgasms, and wonder what an orgasm would feel like. One girl says: “It’s not easy…to have one.” Another girl says genital intercourse is sometimes “very boring.”

A girl who considers herself a lesbian usually keeps her sexual desire (which she calls “being excited”) a secret. When she finally has a chance to feel and express sexual desire with someone who is uninhibited, she laments that “it’s not even that exciting.” The author doesn’t consider the possibility that this girl is sexually dysfunctional; the author avoids the obvious and instead offers the non-explanation: it’s “so difficult to play out her feelings authentically.”

One girl says sexual desire is “all in my head…my body has nothing to do with it.” I begin to wonder if Ms. Tolman, herself, has ever felt sexual desire, when she says here’s one girl who really knows how to describe it: the girl says she feels “really hot, like, my temperature is really, really hot…And my body would like have, I would like have a feeling going up my spine.” That’s the strangest kind of “sexual desire” I’ve ever heard of!

When girls deny sexual desire the author is skeptical of their sincerity, and she says they are reluctant to admit they feel sexual desire. But the author doesn’t consider the opposite possibility: when some girls claim they do feel sexual desire, they may be lying and trying to cover up that their genital organs are dysfunctional.

Ms. Tolman spends a lot of time arguing that sexual desire is “socially constructed,” and she promotes the belief that female “dilemmas” may be treated by a talking cure. She quotes one girl who said that after the interview her sexual experience was “better.” Does that mean the girl experienced clitoral erection and orgasm? The author doesn’t speculate what “better” might mean.

Talking to young girls about sexual desire and pleasure is important and profound, but the author never defines exactly what she means by “sexual desire,” except to say it is “a feeling of wanting.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary (2nd ed.) one definition of desire is “that feeling or emotion which is directed to the attainment or possession of some object from which pleasure or satisfaction is expected.” I would define sexual desire as the wish or urge to have your genitals physically stimulated. Is that what Ms. Tolman meant by “sexual desire,” and is that what her subjects thought she meant?

By that definition even very young children can be observed spontaneously exhibiting sexual desire when they fondle themselves and press or rub their genitals against furniture, adult body parts or other children, although children might not label their feelings with grown-up vocabulary like “sexual desire.” Healthy children fondle themselves intermittently even during non-sexual play, and even when they are primarily focused on the non-sexual play – the sexual self-stimulation is incidental and secondary to the child’s main interest at the moment. It may be considered a failure in empathy for adults to see a child fondle herself and then bizarrely declare “children have no sexual desire.”

Sexual desire may occur before, during or after genital erection, but it is certainly (usually) strongest during genital erection. The existence of spontaneous erection in boys and girls indicates it is primarily a physiological process, not a psychological or cultural phenomenon. Genital erection may be influenced by psychological fears, expectations, or culturally induced shame, but in a healthy individual genital erection is a physiological state – not a social construct.

Oddly, the author says curiosity is “a precursor to desire.” I can imagine that young people’s curiosity is often a precursor to interpersonal sex play, but it’s more likely that some teenage girls who have been mentally castrated confuse curiosity with desire. The girl previously mentioned, with the feeling going up her spine, which the author points to as a model of sexual desire, says of her first time trying genital intercourse: “I just wanted to, because I wanted to see what it was like.” That is not sexual desire; that is curiosity mistakenly labeled as sexual desire.

In my opinion, a healthy individual (male or female, young or old) who has slept well, eaten nutritiously, and is relaxed, feels sexual desire. Curiosity is unnecessary and irrelevant to genuine desire or arousal. Some people also confuse real-world sexual desire with the dramatized fictional image of sexual passion, but in a healthy young person sexual desire is quite casual rather than intense or obsessive.

A few girls report that when they feel sexual desire their vagina “acts up.” Does that mean they lubricate and expand? Little girls often have clitoral erections, just as little boys have penile erections. Healthy mature males continue to have genital erections, but mature females usually don’t. The author does not mention that or ask her subjects about it. Clitoral erectile dysfunction is, as yet, a politically incorrect topic. Political correctness dictates that female sexual dysfunction be blamed on child sexual abuse.

The author arranged to refer girls who reported childhood sexual abuse (carelessly undefined) to so-called “therapists.” One 18-year-old girl revealed that when she was seven a teenage boy did “unspeakable things” to her, and threatened her not to tell anyone. She expresses anger and seems to feel very vindictive toward the boy. Her mother did nothing about it, and neither did the boy’s mother (as far as the girl knows).

The girl is certainly justified in feeling angry, and understandably feels confused. The boy should have asked for the girl’s consent first, and the girl should have had the opportunity to consult her mother before any actual contact. Was the boy previously instructed about that? Why wasn’t he forced to apologize and reassure the girl that he would never threaten her again? Where was the girl’s father when all this was happening?

But the author’s reaction seems just as odd as the mothers: Ms. Tolman suggestively asks if that early experience affects the girl’s current sex life. To the girl’s credit she replies: How should I know? The author’s question sounds to me like a transparent attempt to encourage the girl to blame a male for the girl’s later problems, while ignoring the possible part played by the mother in previously mentally castrating the girl.

Despite her many insightful observations about sexual desire in young girls, the author doesn’t mention that it is women who physically castrate their daughters in the Third World, and it is women (as early childhood educators) who mentally castrate little girls in the West today. Why do some women do that, and why doesn’t the author confront those facts?

Many parents are unaware of the specific physiological origin of female sexual dysfunction – both the lack of desire and the difficulty in reaching orgasm – as an understandable consequence of individual adults sexually neglecting or actively “inhibiting” little girls during early development (2), long before the confused period called adolescence. Many parents unthinkingly commit the same tragedy that they suffered when they were children. Are highly educated feminists unaware as well, or do their political priorities discourage them from acknowledging the inconvenient origin of female sexual dysfunction?

Ms. Tolman doesn’t challenge the ghastly myth that normal sexual desire and healthy sexual function can be safely “inhibited” during early childhood, because they will magically spring back into existence after puberty. In the end the author says what is needed is for women to help teenage girls think about and talk about sexual desire and sexual pleasure, to foster outrage against their “socially manufactured” dilemma. In the very last footnote of the book the author reveals she is well aware of the problem of sexual dysfunction in women – although she understates the prevalence (3), but she suggests that the origin of female sexual dysfunction is the social “dilemma” girls face in adolescence.

In reality the mass hysteria over child sexual abuse, which was started and spread by feminists (4), has legitimized the tradition of mentally castrating girls rather than challenging it. The mythology of child sexual abuse and the eager marketing of unverified “treatment” has demonized early sex play and become a politically correct dogma to excuse women’s responsibility in mentally castrating girls, not in adolescence but beginning in very early childhood.

References
1. Tolman, Deborah L. Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk about Sexual Desire. Harvard Univ. Press, 2002.
2. Clitoral Erectile Dysfunction. http://sexhysteria.wordpress.com/2012/06/04/clitoral-erectile-dysfunction/
3. Tolman cites a 1999 survey, but more recent evidence indicates that two-thirds of women suffer from sexual dysfunction. See: Sammy Elsamra, Michael Nazmy, David Shin, Harry Fisch, Ihor Sawczuk, Debra Fromer. Female sexual dysfunction in urological patients: findings from a major metropolitan area in the USA. BJU International, 2010; DOI: 10.1111/j.1464-410X.2009.09091.x, which was indirectly confirmed by a more recent ABC telephone survey. http://abcnews.go.com/images/Politics/959a1AmericanSexSurvey.pdf
4. Whittier, Nancy. The Politics of Child Sexual Abuse: Emotion, Social Movements, and the State. Oxford Univ. Press, 2011.

According to some authors, informed consent entails understanding the possible consequences of your choices, and the alternatives available (1). Competence to understand consequences and alternatives is certainly an important factor in determining whether an individual may freely consent to sex play.

The ability to resist manipulation may also be considered important, but even mature adults are often quite incompetent to resist the simplest forms of manipulation in interpersonal relations and the commercial marketplace. To resist manipulation, most children (like many adults) need assistance from disinterested third parties, preferably experts in the relevant field: assisted consent.

Do most young people become competent to understand consequences, alternatives and manipulation on midnight of a certain birthday? The concept of “age of consent” is merely an administrative convenience, since competence may vary between individuals of the same age depending on differences in education, experience and biological maturity of the individual’s brain. So in reality accurately measuring competence to consent would require extensive evaluation in each individual case.

To avoid such effort and expense, legal administrators merely assume everyone below an arbitrarily selected age is “incompetent” and then count an individual’s birthdays to determine whether he’s “competent” or not. That simplistic and superficial bureaucratic trick is nonetheless popularly worshiped as if it is an expression of divine wisdom.

The concept of age of consent is merely an expediency for administrators (kings and churchmen in the past, and government employees today), it’s not for children’s benefit. How ironic that individuals who call themselves a child’s “protectors” have no qualms about administering carelessly conceived rules to selfishly lighten their own workload.

Taking advantage of the widespread ignorance over the concept of age of consent, some other individuals claim that many states and countries had a surprisingly low age of consent in the past, and suggest that such ages are highly relevant to the question of competence to consent today. Such individuals seem to think that if age of consent was lower throughout most of history, the current (higher) age of consent is a historical aberration.

But even if the age of consent was much lower in the past, that doesn’t necessarily mean that younger children are competent to consent today. In any case, we still have to obey current laws, and any age of consent is arbitrary: some individuals below the arbitrarily selected age may actually be very competent, while other individuals above the magic age may actually be incompetent.

Instead of worshiping administrative convenience, I believe that children should be educated for competence from the earliest age. A responsible parent teaches a child what consent means, and that granting or withholding consent is every child’s right. Instead of telling a child nothing about sex, or simply commanding: “Don’t you dare do it!” (and thereby provoking reckless rebellion), a responsible parent informs a child about the need to understand alternative choices and possible consequences of each choice, and the opportunity to seek third-party (preferably expert) advice before deciding to consent.

For example, a responsible parent advises a daughter of any age that when she feels she wants to experience anything more than minor sex play, they can go to a gynecologist together first to learn how to avoid injury, disease or unplanned pregnancy.

Traditionally, adults are considered responsible to foster a child’s health and happiness for his long-term benefit, even if that entails disregarding the very young child’s current wishes. Many parents abuse that custom, e.g. by forcing children to undergo unnecessary circumcision in infancy. Deciding to disregard children’s consent may be easy in infancy and very early childhood, but the older a child gets, the harder such parental judgments become. There is not much difference between the reasoning ability of 11-year-olds and university students (2), and what little difference there is may be reduced even further through specific education for competence. So competence or incompetence to understand consequences and alternatives is far from clear in many individual cases.

Some pediatric protocols assert a child’s right to be informed about the seriousness of his disease, the risks and benefits of different treatment options, and where relevant: the possibility of imminent death. There is evidence that “parents who have open conversations with their child about death and dying do not regret having done so” (3). When children are well-informed they can avoid unnecessary fears or worries, e.g. that dying is physically painful, or that opioid sedation hastens death. Children of any age should be informed that fast-acting medicines eliminate moderate to severe physical pain, so if necessary a patient can be medicated to sleep and dream most of the time, without impairing attempts to prolong life.

Care aimed at improving quality of life in the here and now can and should be provided along with life-prolonging care. But some adults believe that it is better to deceive the child into thinking his illness is only temporary and will disappear eventually. Some parents don’t even want their child to be informed of what his disease is (e.g. cancer). If his condition progressively worsens, then some people believe that parents, doctors and psychologists should lie by telling the child this is only a temporary setback.

That strategy has serious obstacles in practice because children aren’t stupid. The patient may subtly perceive the truth, or may find out the truth (e.g. from another patient), or the child may hear about the death of another patient who has the same disease and “isn’t supposed to die.” In such cases the child may lose all faith in the words of parents and medical staff, and may understandably rebel and refuse to comply with any directions. Deceiving a seriously ill child sometimes entails deceiving siblings too, and such deception may have a life-long, negative impact on the surviving sibling’s trust in his parents as well as health care personnel in the future.

Another strategy is the religious belief in the afterlife. Some children are told that God wants to separate the child’s soul from his body, bury his body in a box, and send his soul to heaven (i.e. take him away from his parents). But in practice a child may naturally wonder: What kind of God is that? Parents in such cases, even true believers, may have difficulty hiding their own discomfort, and the child may perceive the parent’s veiled skepticism. In such cases the child may not only lose hope but even question the parent’s ability to reason coherently. A child in that situation may suffer even more.

Misinforming a child patient and siblings about prognostic uncertainty and possibly imminent death denies them the opportunity to do things they would like to do while they still have the chance. End-of-life planning should occur well in advance, not during a near-death crisis. For example, boys and girls who are terminally ill may be allowed to sleep together if that’s what they want. Young people can be given the choice to agree to tissue/organ donation or sperm/egg donation, thereby enjoying the satisfaction of voluntarily helping others and leaving a legacy. A deceived child’s death is, in effect, worse than what it could have been because it is sudden and without warning as far as the children are concerned – precisely because of adult deception.

No one doubts that at some point during development the child becomes competent to be informed and make his own choices. Many children in Western countries today have access to much more information, as well as more leisure to study, and hence may be in a better position to make mature judgments than children in the past or in other cultures.

Robert Epstein has described how in some cultures a person is considered mature and a full member of the community at puberty. Such individuals can and do work, marry, participate in community decisions, etc. (4). In modern Western culture young people have no political or economic power or influence, so it is no wonder that they are often hostile (“rebellious”) and even suicidal.

The complex problem of competence to consent can be confronted more effectively by educating children for competence from the earliest age, including critical evaluation of popular information sources such as the mass entertainment “news” media. Children should even be informed about the future possibility of serious or terminal illness, and asked if they would prefer to be accurately informed (or lied to) in such a case, which gives children more of a sense of control.

Conversations with children about these subjects at different ages may be recorded, and such recordings may serve as evidence of individual competence and a kind of living will. Conversely, a parent’s refusal to educate a child about consent may be considered a form of selfish and irresponsible neglect. I suspect that children who have been specifically educated for competence, and have previously chosen to always be accurately informed, will surprise and inspire us all when and if they are actually faced with challenging decisions.

References:
1. Faden, Ruth R. et al. A History and Theory of Informed Consent. Oxford Univ. Press. 1986.
2. Lipmann, Mathew. Thinking in Education. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003.
3. Ullrich, Christina et al. Pediatric Palliative Care. Chapter 40 in: Kliegman, Robert M. et al. (ed.) Nelson Textbook of Pediatrics. 19e. Saunders, 2011.
4. Epstein, Robert. The Case Against Adolescence. Quill Driver Books, 2007.

 Greer suggests that “the role of the eunuch,” and “a passive sexual role” result in “the force of inertia,” and are the culprits in mentally castrating girls. Although she rejects the “capitalist” viewpoint in which sexual energy must be conserved and invested wisely (the myth that holding back sexual energy makes an individual somehow stronger), she nonetheless didn’t realize the physiological connection between early sexual “inhibition” and clitoral erectile dysfunction later (2).

 Greer clearly recognizes that “The little girl is not encouraged to explore her own genitals or to identify the tissues of which they are composed, or to understand the mechanism of lubrication and erection.” (p. 44) Such anti-sex indoctrination leads to guilt feelings and “role expectations” that must be overcome through consciousness-raising; the liberated woman must “rediscover” sexual pleasure, says Greer, as if being sexually functional is merely something women were forced to forget.

 At puberty or in adolescence “Little girls only learn about the pleasure of sex as an implication of their discoveries about their reproductive function, as something merely incidental.” (p. 53) But instead of offering insights and specific recommendations on sex education and practice in early and later childhood, Greer complains that the sexual revolution has led to an increase in “child violation,” and she criticizes Masters and Johnson’s research because it has led to excessive focus on the clitoris!

 In reference to adult women’s sexuality Greer laments that female orgasm has come to be considered a “duty.” She did not mean that orgasm is unpleasant; her complaint concedes that reaching orgasm is no easy task for many modern women. Of course, it should be obvious that modern women cannot be expected to have orgasms if they have been mentally castrated. What Greer failed to realize is that for many women, reaching orgasm during normal intercourse isn’t merely difficult, it’s physiologically impossible, and all the consciousness-raising in the world won’t change that.

 Greer makes fun of traditional love stories but is just as silly herself in citing the ridiculous myth that without romantic rituals “sexual intercourse is another household duty” (p. 205), and women are “frigid because the requirements of romance are not satisfied” (p. 221). She also seemed to believe that once women achieve political, economic and social equality, female sexual dysfunction will disappear naturally, like the withering away of the state in a communist utopia. But I’m afraid the bitter pill is that sexual function is a matter of physiology not sociology, and mental castration cannot be cured; it must be prevented.

 The brain area that has atrophied as a result of lack of stimulation during development cannot suddenly develop the capacity to make a dysfunctional clitoris become robust. In some cases a girl who was allowed to develop sexually may become temporarily dysfunctional later due to physical trauma or severe psychological stress, and she may benefit from some form of convalescent therapy (neuroplasticity). But I suspect the more frequent diagnosis is that healthy clitoral function was permanently damaged by early neglect or active “inhibition” by misguided parents.

 The tragedy of millions of women permanently mentally castrated may be partially offset by the hope for future generations. Adults must learn that when a little girl raises her hand under her skirt in private or in public, she has not done something uncivilized or unhealthy. Parents must not stare, scold the child, “distract” her, or otherwise interfere with her self-stimulation. The child is not merely indulging in gratuitous pleasure; she is developing the area of her brain that makes normal (i.e. healthy) sexual response possible. The child’s self-stimulation is precisely what is appropriate for children to do. When, where and how she does so should be her instinctive choice, not a dictate of distorted social etiquette.

 Self-stimulation is only one side of the story. The sacred cow of “virginity” in youth should be attacked as an ancient joke. In the distant past before science understood the nature of micro-organisms and infectious disease, people were the helpless victims of superstition. The high-sounding word “chastity” literally means cleanliness. Guess what: It has been discovered that cleanliness is a matter of soap and water, or other hygienic practices, not abstinence from sexual contact. Cross-cultural evidence indicates that pre-industrial traditions, rituals and taboos that supposedly make an individual “clean” cannot be explained or justified in terms of hygiene (3).

 In some parts of the Third World today many mothers still physically castrate their daughters. Here in the West Greer and some other confused feminists have contributed to mentally castrating millions of their young “sisters” by sowing enmity between boys and girls, and raising suspicion about what is actually natural and healthy sex play in childhood. Girls love playing matchmaker for single teachers, an obvious source of vicarious excitement for inhibited little ladies.

 Life is filled with real magic, and one of the most magical parts of life is the too-infrequent interaction of boys and girls through visual, auditory and – yes – tactile communication. Parents should cultivate and foster that contact through education, e.g. instructional videos to learn buddy massage, not avoid and prohibit contact through enforced isolation or gender segregation, such as girls-only pajama parties!

 Even Greer criticized Israeli kibbutzim where children were subject to “an unnatural restriction” against sexual experimentation (p. 264). Mutual play and exploration are normal ways for children to experience the wonder of life, and develop healthy sexual response in the process. Boys and girls belong together, and children’s spontaneous sex play should be welcomed as conducive to healthy neurological function.

1. Greer, Germaine. The Female Eunuch. 2008 (originally published 1970).

2. Clitoral Erectile Dysfunction. http://sexhysteria.wordpress.com/2012/06/04/clitoral-erectile-dysfunction/

3. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Routledge, 2002.

Some therapists and other special interests profit from the creation of categories of customers who “need” products and services that therapists want to sell (2). However, whether or not such categories actually correspond to any individuals in the real world is debatable. Contrary to popular beliefs and claims about “abnormal attraction” or “excessive arousal,” there is a strong case to be made for a more positive view of sexual health based on the conventional medical model of the effective functioning of body organs.

A paradigm case is the category of homosexuality, which was formerly considered a form of mental disorder on the basis of its “abnormality.” Although some suggest that the recent removal of homosexuality as a category of mental disorder was due to political pressure and threats of violence rather than clinical evidence, it has been convincingly shown that the criterion of “abnormality” is inappropriate as a measure of mental health (3).

A similar case is that of pedophilia, which may be viewed as a form of fixation, and considered a mental disorder when (if) accompanied by difficulties in work, social relationships, or other important areas in life, not because it is “abnormal.” As we shall see, some arousal toward children is normal in the statistical sense.

The very existence of “homosexuals” or “pedophiles” should not be taken for granted, even though some individuals choose to identify themselves as members of those categories. Note that millions of people consider themselves “Christians,” and invest a lot of effort to convince themselves and others that they really are “Christians,” but despite my 60 years and extensive travels I have yet to meet a single person I would call a genuine follower of Jesus of Nazareth.

Some sexologists now consider sexual “orientation” or sexual “identity” to be a matter of degree rather than either-or. Statistically, most people may be primarily heterosexual or primarily homosexual, but few people (if any) are 100% hetero or 100% homo. In some individuals that degree may be fluid and change over time. For example, in childhood an individual may be less hetero, but during the reproductive years become more strongly hetero, and then in old age become less hetero again.

There is some evidence that “pedophilia” may also be a matter of degree. Experiments using laboratory instruments to measure signs of sexual arousal in men and women have found that many people who are not “pedophiles” (if defined as an exclusive sexual preference for children) exhibit varying degrees of sexual arousal when shown photographs of children accompanied by erotic audio narrative (4). Some degree of sexual arousal to children may very well be species-typical, and may change over time, rather than being a neat, clear and fixed category requiring professional merchandizing of psycho products and services.

A popular belief is that any sexual arousal toward children is extremely dangerous to the latter as well as society as a whole, but there is no evidence that arousal must necessarily lead to acts of sexual abuse. Some individuals may feel strong arousal to children but never actually go out and violate a child. Similarly, some children who are sexually abused may be the victims of psychopaths (who usually prefer adult victims), not “pedophiles.”

I have already criticized the fairy tale that all children who are touched in an unauthorized place are inevitably traumatized for life (5). As a volunteer with child cancer patients and their families for many years, I am repeatedly amazed at how many kids can completely ignore their life-threatening illness and be happy as if they are at home rather than confined in a hospital. The exaggeration and exploitation of the category of child sex abuse victims is perhaps the most shameful practice of opportunists and profiteers in the rescue business.

As far as we know it’s possible that the reality is quite the contrary: a significant lack of arousal to children may be a contraindication for parenting or jobs with childcare responsibilities. In my extensive personal experience I have repeatedly seen children dangerously neglected and even physically injured by self-proclaimed asexual heroes of prudery. A chilling example: a staunch enemy of “abnormal arousal” allowed a toddler to enter a backyard pool unsupervised. “Don’t worry,” the adult said, “he’s wearing a floatation jacket.” When I rushed to be with the boy I found him in the deep water with his floatation jacket unfastened.

Instead of considering kinds and degrees of sexual arousal as mental disorders, it might be more fruitful to study the other side of sexual fixations. When an individual is obsessed with one gender or age group, he is usually dysfunctional with the other gender or age groups. From that point of view, both heterosexuality and homosexuality are disorders, as are both pedophilia and its opposite: the mature-playmate-only model of political correctness.

In other words, the interesting problem that is worthy of closer study is: why do some people (“heterosexuals”) exclude same-sex playmates? Why do other people (“homosexuals”) exclude opposite-sex playmates? Why do people with different-age preferences (“pedophiles”) exclude same-age playmates? Why do people with same-age preferences (the “politically correct”) exclude other-age playmates?

There seem to be some values of sexual attractiveness that are very common if not universal: i.e. no physical deformity and no symptoms of infectious disease. But the possession or not of genitalia of the “right” gender, or the age (maturity or immaturity) of genitalia, seem to be odd reasons for failing to experience arousal. If we consider love an element in arousal, individuals of any gender or age group may possess the qualities that make a person potentially loveable. What specific qualities of any gender or age group are equivalent to deformity or disease?

Insofar as physical appearance is an element in arousal, we must note that the quality of someone’s physical appearance is not necessarily related to any age or gender. Some individuals are widely considered average-looking or even mediocre before maturity, but become more attractive after maturity; while other individuals are widely considered very attractive (“model material”) before maturity, but become less attractive after maturity.

A girl may be pleasingly tall and thin before maturity, but become excessively tall or obese after maturity. Or a nose may be well-proportioned before maturity, but become oversized after maturity. Being flat-chested before maturity is unobjectionable, but if a girl remains flat-chested after maturity she is commonly considered unattractive. Age – in itself – is not a reliable indication of the quality of physical appearance.

What are the origins of attraction and arousal? In evolutionary terms, the tendency to be aroused by individuals during the reproductive years is often rewarded by offspring, who in turn may pass on the same tendency. Hence, the statistical infrequency (“perversion”) of arousal during the reproductive period that is not likely to result in reproduction. But even though it is popularly considered “perverted” to be aroused by individuals who are before the reproductive period, nobody suggests that being aroused by individuals who are after the reproductive period is “perverted.”

When you are too young or too old to reproduce (or otherwise infertile), there is no evolutionary advantage in being aroused by individuals who are in their reproductive period. Likewise, there is no evolutionary advantage in being aroused by individuals who are voluntarily infertile, e.g. on oral contraceptives or determined to abort any eventual conception. Evolutionary tendencies that developed in one environment may be useless or even fatal in a changed environment, and hence are not an appropriate measure of mental health.

Under some circumstances an inability to experience arousal with the “wrong” class of partner or playmate may be considered a form of dysfunction. In terms of organ function, when someone sits on a healthy male’s lap, the sensation of warm, soft buttocks in contact with the male’s penis (even indirectly through clothing) causes an erection. That is a normal and healthy physiological reflex. It should not matter what gender or age the person sitting on your lap happens to be. If you don’t get an erection, then your erectile reflex may be considered dysfunctional.

The paradigm case here is the child. Children are models of robust health, energy, highly effective organ function, amazing resilience and healing. When a healthy little girl straddles an adult’s knee, you can feel the tip of her clitoris protrude erect, pressing against your knee like a firm fingertip. That is a normal and healthy physiological reflex, and it doesn’t matter to the child if the knee is male or female, young or old. Children tend to stimulate themselves in order to develop the relative brain areas that render sexual function robust. When a little girl wants to straddle her father’s knee while eating lunch in a public restaurant, she should be welcome to do so.

As I pointed out in my previous post, many individuals who claim to be aroused by the “right” class of playmates are merely faking arousal (6). The same may be true for love: many people who claim they love “only” a certain limited class of individuals are merely faking love. They don’t really love anybody. One practical advantage of limiting the pool of “acceptable” playmates is to limit the burden of how many potential playmates you have to fake arousal by or love for. Individuals who are sexually dysfunctional may be understandably invidious and attempt to hide and defend their dysfunction by attacking sexually functional individuals as “sex maniacs.”

It’s also possible that the burden of sexual dysfunction isn’t merely a lack of sexual and emotional pleasure; there may be a causal link between sexual dysfunction and other health problems such as Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS). Epidemiological data indicate that women – who are disproportionally sexually dysfunctional – suffer from IBS at 2.5 to 4 times the rate of men. In the case of the male, lack of a functional sex life is a risk factor in eventual prostate cancer.

Children are highly flexible in their choice of playmates, sexual or otherwise. Kids aren’t so much “bisexual” as they are Omni-sexual. But through years of neglect or deliberate mental castration by a parent many become less flexible and even dysfunctional as they mature. The mental health industry is quietly moving away from the primitive focus on “abnormality,” but superficial popular attitudes cultivated by the mass entertainment “news” media still thrive.

An important step in preserving children’s healthy capacity to function flexibly throughout the lifespan is to promote accurate, balanced and comprehensive sex education from the earliest age.

References:

• 1. See, for example, “The Talk: What Your Kids Need to Hear from You About Sex,” by Sharon Maxwell (Avery, 2008), in which the author makes the unsupported claim: “99% of ten-year-olds have never felt an inkling of sexual desire.”

• 2.
• “From Persuasion to Coercion: Psychopharma’s Priesthood of the Mind.” http://memoryholeblog.com/2012/10/05/from-persuasion-to-coercion-psychopharmas-priesthood-of-the-mind/#comments

• 3.
• “Homosexuality and the Unnaturalness Argument,” in Philosophy and Sex, Robert Baker et al. (eds), Prometheus Books.

• 4.
• “Pedophilia and Sexual Offending Against Children: Theory, Assessment and Intervention.” Michael C. Seto. American Psychological Association. 2007.

• 5. “The Courage to heal? A Critical Review.” http://sexhysteria.wordpress.com/2012/04/15/the-courage-to-heal-a-critical-review/

6.“Faking Orgasm to Hide Sexual Dysfunction.”

http://sexhysteria.wordpress.com/2013/01/02/faking-orgasm-to-hide-sexual-dysfunction/

First we should note that no woman need feel guilty or blameworthy for any attempt to hide sexual dysfunction. As I have pointed out previously (2), I believe that female sexual dysfunction is often caused by mental castration in childhood by parents and other misguided teachers, so when a woman grows up sexually dysfunctional she can hardly be considered at fault, and since mental castration is not yet popularly acknowledged, attempts to hide the problem rather than admit it and confront it are perfectly understandable.

The classic attempt to fake orgasms is for the woman to make dramatic noises during intercourse, such as “Ooh, ooh, oh, oh, ah, ah…” with increasing pitch and/or frequency to coincide with the male’s approaching climax. The dysfunctional woman attempts to deceive her partner into thinking she is normal and healthy (i.e. sexually functional).

But in reality the build-up to genuine orgasm is a process of progressively deepening relaxation, not increasing “excitement” as the dysfunctional woman mistakenly presumes. It has become a cinematic fashion to portray feverous excitement as normal sexual arousal, but such exaggerated drama is for the goal of story-telling, not realism.

Monkeys in the wild approach copulation very casually, and female monkeys in the laboratory have been measured reaching orgasm within seconds of penetration, without any sound effects, just as male monkeys and sexually functional male humans. If anything, making theatrical sounds distracts the male’s concentration and interferes with relaxation, rendering his orgasm more difficult. I suspect that women who manage to reach orgasm alone with the aid of a medical prosthesis (“vibrator”) do not engage in any audio drama. The only purpose of the woman’s sound effects during intercourse with a partner is to hide the woman’s sexual dysfunction.

I think it’s also safe to assume that male monkeys don’t study sexual techniques to become expert performers to satisfy their mates. Nor do male monkeys try to delay their own orgasm as long as possible to give the female “enough time” to climax too.

When it comes to the question of penis size, the logic of the “big is better” is unconvincing. Relative to body size, all species of monkeys have a smaller penis than human males. In theory, a larger penis is more effective in stimulating the vagina and clitoris (which actually extends internally and along both sides of the vaginal opening). But if that were true, then large vibrators would be more effective than small vibrators, or in the case of the male, being masturbated by a large hand would be more effective than being masturbated by a small hand. But none of these natural extensions of the logic of penis size have ever been verified.

Some men may really believe that a partner faking orgasm is sexually functional, while other men don’t care, and some men pretend to believe it so as not to hurt the woman’s feelings. (Some men fake orgasm too.) In a random telephone survey, most women who admitted faking orgasm (nearly half of those surveyed) said they did it to “please” the partner or to get the act over with. Only 30% of women surveyed said they always have orgasm during “sex” (3). The latter figure is consistent with previous surveys in which two-thirds of women admitted suffering from some form of sexual dysfunction. Strangely, the multiple choice questions did not even include “to hide sexual dysfunction” as a possible answer to the question: Why fake an orgasm?

We may reasonably ask, What is more pathetic: women pretending to have orgasms, or men pretending to believe them? Monkeys and other mammals make no attempt to hide their desire for copulation, nor the obvious pleasure of intercourse. The young see sexual activity modeled on a daily basis as a normal and positive part of life. Monkeys and apes do not grow up sexually addicted by such modeling. Our closest relatives do grow up to become sexually dysfunctional when they are isolated in the laboratory and don’t witness sexual desire and the pleasure of normal intercourse.

Historically I suspect that faking orgasms is a recent phenomenon. In the past when religious dogma had more influence on popular culture, male sexuality was downplayed and female sexuality was denied completely. So if a woman did feel sexual desire or sexual pleasure, she was expected to hide it rather than exaggerate it.

Once when I was a university student a professor was talking about estrus in lower mammals (the period of fertility when females become more receptive to copulation), and I remember a young woman in the class turned red and she looked away to hide her embarrassment. Even today, in some families a “virtuous” woman is expected to act as if she is mentally castrated whether she actually is or not; i.e. she is expected to be uninterested in and unresponsive to sexual stimulation.

That’s one reason why the “spurned woman” was traditionally considered a victim. If a man had a sexual relationship with a woman without following up with marriage, he had enjoyed himself but she (assumed to be “virtuous” and hence uninterested in sexual pleasure) hadn’t.

Sexual desire and sexual pleasure are perfectly normal and natural, and there is good reason to believe that the immature clitoris and penis need stimulation during childhood to allow the relative brain areas to develop healthy sexual function (4). Women’s physical and mental health require that the custom of mentally castrating little girls be stopped.

Even though immature sexual organs aren’t capable of genital intercourse, they may be effectively stimulated through self-masturbation. In the current climate of hysteria over child sexual abuse, that means there needs to be legislative reform that specifically allows parents to teach their children how to masturbate (e.g. by providing access to instructional videos), and specifically allows a parent to give children the opportunity (time and space) to masturbate or engage in sex play (mutual masturbation) with each other. Such children will grow up to become sexually functional adults, and pathetic behavior like faking orgasms will then become a relic of history.

References:

1. The hypothesis of a “design flaw” in female anatomy is quoted in: “The Science of Orgasm.” Barry R. Komisaruk, et al. 2006. The suggestion that the clitoris is in “the wrong place” is by the author of: “The Technology of Orgasm: Hysteria, the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction.” Rachel P. Maines, 2001.
2. “Sexual Inhibition and Mental Castration.” http://sexhysteria.wordpress.com/2011/04/06/sexual-inhibition-and-mental-castration/
3. “The American Sex Survey: A Peek Beneath the Sheets.” ABC News, 2004. http://abcnews.go.com/images/Politics/959a1AmericanSexSurvey.pdf
4. “Clitoral Erectile Dysfunction.” http://sexhysteria.wordpress.com/2012/06/04/clitoral-erectile-dysfunction/

Claiming that child sexual abuse is “more prevalent” than was believed in the past, and that many more kinds of behavior should be labeled “abusive,” the authors say they hope to educate modern parents about what professionals have learned by “working with” victims of abuse. The authors state: “It is not the purpose of this paper to blame or accuse. Obviously, if we do not understand a child’s boundaries it is because our own parents did not model proper boundaries.” Then, without further explanation or justification, the authors list what they have divined are “proper boundaries” through their vague and mysterious “work” with victims of abuse.

“1) Touching the buttocks or future erogenous zones. Some parents touch and kiss their child’s buttocks. Most likely this happened to them as a child. They are confused about this boundary. The buttocks should never be touched. The area of the breast of young girls is a future erogenous zone and should not be touched.”

We are not informed as to why the authors specify the buttocks or breast area, or why this evidently important prescription is given first place on the list. Aside from the pretentious claims of probability (“most likely”), are there careful unbiased studies published in peer-reviewed journals demonstrating causation of harm, which are so widely known that there is no need to cite any references? Quite the contrary, the lack of references indicates the absence of valid evidence to support such claims.

In addition, the very concept of “erogenous zones” is suspect. Are not the lips, ears and other parts of the body “erogenous zones” that are not to be touched? Is there careful research published in which children whose buttocks and breast area were “touched” and suffered mental or physiological injury (controlling for the possible influence of other variables), compared to children whose ears or lips were “touched” and did not suffer mental or physiological fallout? The wise “professionals” see no need to address that inconvenient question, and instead move right on to the next prescription on the list.

“2) Putting medicine on a child’s genitals. It is not appropriate to put medicine on a child’s genitals. At about 2 years of age, the child is capable of applying medicine to his/her own genitals. The parent should put the medicine on the child’s finger and then ask the child to apply the medicine him/herself.”

Here I’m tempted to assume that the authors were joking. When I told two friends about it (a husband and wife team of pediatricians), they both laughed. There is no “medicine” that a two-year-old should be entrusted to apply to his own genitals. Antibiotic, anti-inflammatory or steroid creams are not intended for a two-year-old to apply to his or her own genitals. Do the authors consider sun-block a form of medicine?

The authors seem to be expressing their own confusion about the supposed importance of avoiding manual contact with a child’s genital area. A traditional treatment of pediatric phimosis (excessively tight foreskin in baby boys), is precisely for the parent(s) to exercise the foreskin of the child’s penis regularly (daily) by using the fingers to pull (stretch) the foreskin back so that the skin will grow new cells rather than become even tighter with age and necessitate eventual surgery (partial circumcision). These “professionals” seem unaware or strangely silent about the supposedly widespread “abuse” of countless baby boys traditionally prescribed by pediatricians for decades.

“3) Bathing a child and washing his or her genitals. Some parents continue to bathe their child well up into adolescence. The parent feels as if the child cannot clean himself/herself correctly or they feel that it is an act of love to give their child a bath. For opposite sex parent and child, between the age of 4 – 5, the parent should stop bathing their child. The child is perfectly capable of washing himself/herself. If the parent must wash the child’s hair, the child should wear underwear in the tub. By age 8, the child is fully capable of washing his/her own hair without the parent’s assistance. For same sex parent and child, between the age of 4 – 5, the parent should stop bathing their child. The child is perfectly capable of washing himself/herself. If the parent must wash the child’s hair, the child does not need to wear underwear in the tub. Again, by age 8, the child is fully capable of washing his/her own hair without the parent’s assistance.”

No evidence or logic is provided for this prescription that contradicts generations, centuries, or millennia of parental practice. Nor is any evidence or logic offered for the specific ages cited or for distinguishing between what is supposedly appropriate for same-sex vs. opposite sex parents. Such precise prescriptions have been established by the “professionals” without any need to cite or describe their careful research.

I was bathed by my mother until I was 12, and I challenge anyone to demonstrate any causal link between that experience and any later mental or physiological symptoms. How could any causal link be known in such a complex set of possible variables? As far as we know, the very opposite of what the authors claim may be the case: Failing to allow children past age 4-5 to be seen by their opposite sex parent may lead to toxic body shame and stress over sexual functions. This prescription dictates simplistic moral philosophy disguised as “professional” advice.

“4) Disregarding the child’s privacy. Some parents feel that they have the right to walk in on their child whenever they please. Parents must get in the habit of knocking on doors before they enter a bedroom or bathroom. Children should be taught to close and lock bathroom doors and to always knock whenever they see a closed door. This will create future good habits and the child will learn to respect another’s privacy.”

Yes, parents should not barge in on children in the bathroom without knocking, and children should learn to respect other people’s privacy by knocking first. I agree with this purely moral prescription as long as no health claims are connected to it, except for the prescription that children should be taught to “lock” bathroom doors. Closing a door should be sufficient to ensure privacy, without an excessive concern about locking the door as well. Why not advocate bolting bathroom doors and installing an alarm as well? Or how about a video surveillance camera outside the bathroom door to discourage violators and ensure a peaceful, stress-free environment for toilet functions???

“5) Walking around the house half dressed or completely unclothed. Some parents feel that there is nothing wrong with walking around the house unclothed. They may dress and undress in front of their child and step out of the shower while the child is in the bathroom. For opposite sex parent and child, between the age of 3 – 4, the parent should stop dressing or undressing in front of the child, and they should not walk around the house unclothed. For same sex parent and child, between the age of 7 – 8, the parent should stop dressing or undressing in front of the child, and they should not walk around the house unclothed.”

Here the authors seem to assume the classic fallacy that nudity is sexually arousing, and sexual arousal is a bad thing – especially at an early age. But in reality visual arousal is an effect of hiding the reproductive organs, not exposing them. These “professionals” seem to have no experience of family and social naturism (nudism), and they seem unaware that fixation is caused by deprivation, not satisfaction.

Where is the evidence or logic in choosing any specific age after which the sight of the unclothed mature body becomes a risk factor in any problems then or later? I not only feel there is nothing wrong with nudity at any age, I strongly believe that nudity is conducive to mental and physical health by promoting comfort with the appearance of the human body rather than promoting mystery, fear and body shame.

One difference between the authors and myself is that I’m not arrogantly claiming all parents “should” walk around unclothed. I’m willing to admit it is a matter of personal opinion and personal preference, until such time as valid evidence (rather than unsubstantiated claims) clearly demonstrates a health risk.

“6) Undressing the child in public. Some parents undress their child at the park, at the swimming pool or at school in full view of other children and adults. Between the ages of 4 – 5 the child should be instructed to change in a bathroom.”

Why isn’t the child given a choice as to whether and at what age he or she prefers to be undressed in public or not? The authors here are contradicting the moral prescription they stated in 4. I agree that if a child prefers not to be changed in public, then the child’s preference should be respected. On the same token, if the child is indifferent or does want to change in public (e.g. for convenience), then the parents should not command (“instruct”) the child to change in a shame-room, I mean bathroom. The authors themselves are crossing a child’s boundaries by failing to ask what the individual child prefers.

“7) Allowing the child to sleep in the parent’s bed. Sleeping in a parent’s bed is not appropriate. Between the age of 3-4 this practice should be discontinued. The child may be invited to crawl into the parent’s bed in the morning for hugs and kisses.

This apparently arbitrary prescription is the most arrogant one so far. What is dangerous about sleeping in the same bed? Why a universal ban on all families with no exceptions? No need to explain anything, just trust the wise “professionals” who “work with” abuse victims.

There is a book that features an extensive discussion of children sleeping with parents, and the book’s authors argue convincingly that children can be allowed and encouraged to sleep with their parents if the children want to. If siblings are available at about age four or later, children themselves usually choose to sleep in a separate bed with siblings instead (2). Cases are cited in which children who sleep together have warmer personalities, fewer nighttime problems, and better relationships with other family members. Although there is no hard statistical data, I suspect that careful research would confirm the benefits of voluntary family sleeping rather than forced isolation.

“8) Being sexually intimate with a partner while the child is asleep in the same room. Some parents share their bedroom with their child and engage in sexual intimacy while they believe the child is asleep. Often times, the child is wide awake and listening. This can create confusion, fear, and arousal in a child. Therefore, always wait until the child is out of the room to engage in any form of sexual intimacy.”

Aside from the unsupported claim that “Often times, the child is wide awake and listening” this prescription seems to assume that all children are unaware of what sexual intimacy is, or else all children have been indoctrinated to believe that sexual intimacy is “bad.” But that is not the case. Some parents do provide their children with accurate, balanced and comprehensive sexuality education, so the only reason such children might feel confused or afraid is if they wonder why the parents are apparently attempting to hide sexual intimacy.

In those cases where some children have been kept ignorant about sexual intimacy, or have been taught that sexual intimacy is “evil,” dirty, etc. in some sense, then perhaps those parents should be consistent and abstain from sexual intimacy altogether for the good of the child as well as the parents’ own good.

In a previous post I addressed the claim that sexual arousal or “overstimulation” is somehow dangerous or unhealthy for children (3), but here let me add that our closest relatives – chimps and bonobos – don’t hide sexual intimacy from youngsters, and despite extensive observations by scientists from the U.S., Europe and Japan, there are no reports that our closest relatives suffer from sexual “addiction” or sexual dysfunction.

“9) Talking about a child’s genitals while the child is listening. Some parents talk to other parents about their child’s genitals in front of the child. ‘My son is well endowed. He sure is going to make a lot of women happy someday’ or ‘I just know Becky is going to have large breasts.’ This can create embarrassment and confusion in the child since s/he does not comprehend the full nature of the conversation. Therefore, there should be no mention of the child’s private body parts while the child is listening.”

Again, the authors seem to assume that all children have the same education and experience, which is not the case. In many cultures adults joke about sex in front of children, and the children are clearly aware that the adults are only joking. As far as we know, instead of creating “embarrassment and confusion” in such cases, sexual talk may prepare and inoculate experienced children for possible discomfort when interacting with peers in school or other places where the parents are not present.

The authors also seem to assume that certain body parts are inherently “private,” when in reality it is the parents themselves and other misguided teachers who indoctrinate children to label and define certain body parts as “private,” a morally prescriptive label of religious origin (4). In moral terms, every child’s whole body is private. No child has any “public” body parts.

“10) Using inappropriate names when referring to private body parts. Using profane words or calling private body parts inappropriate names such as “weenie”, “winkie”, “boobs”, and “booty”, communicates a profane view of the body that feels icky and which causes confusion in the child. The parent should only use anatomically correct terms for private body parts.”

The authors here reveal a superficial understanding of the nature of language and communication. Using “profane” (rather than sacred) words for body parts may be motivated by different reasons depending on the speaker, and may be interpreted in different ways depending on the listener. The authors see no possible confusion in referring to children feeling “icky” ???

In some languages a little girl’s genital area is called “little flower.” I interpret that choice of words as an expression of affection, and possibly an attempt to reassure children that the female genital area is beautiful rather than ugly, and I believe that most children who hear the phrase “little flower” interpret it positively rather than becoming “confused.”

My belief could be tested by surveying children about how they interpret that choice of nickname. It would also be interesting to ask children why they think some parents use the morally prescriptive label “private parts” rather than anatomically correct terms – which the authors advocate inconsistently.

“11) Telling dirty jokes, leaving provocative magazines about, allowing the child to watch movies of a sexual nature. Exposing a child to material of a sexual nature is sexual abuse.”

This dangerously arrogant prescription creates a class of criminals by definition, without the slightest scientific support or logical justification. Informal sex education, entertainment or exposure to cultural norms is a serious crime, we are told, period. In reality, it is reasonable and plausible to suspect that failure to expose children to sexual information, formal and informal, at an early age may result in future customers for psychotherapy. How convenient for these “professionals.” Discussing sex openly and humorously is an expression that sex is a normal and healthy part of life.

“12) Communication to the child that sex is dirty, evil or nasty. Some parents tell the child that the genitals are dirty and that sex is evil and nasty. They shame the child if the child touches himself/herself and may even punish the child for masturbating. Parents should never insinuate that sex or the human body is bad, dirty or nasty. If the child asks questions about the body or about how babies are made, parents should answer questions thoughtfully and appropriately. The explanation given to a four year old will be different than the explanation given to a ten year old. A number of books on the subject matter have been written. Parents can consult the books and be ready with age appropriate answers. As regards to masturbation, it is a perfectly normal practice as long as the child does it in private. On ultra-sound, male fetuses have been observed masturbating in the womb.”

Yes, childhood masturbation is normal, and parents should never insinuate that sex or the human body is bad, dirty or nasty. But doesn’t this prescription contradict the others? Are we not insinuating that sex is evil and nasty by avoiding the sight of adults nude or contact with the child’s genital area? It is true that there are “a number of books on the subject,” but they don’t all agree on what is appropriate for parents to tell children. Like many authors, these “professionals” advocate telling children about how babies are made, but avoid explicitly discussing sexual desire and sexual pleasure, which is the very crux of the matter (5).

“13) Touching, kissing or hugging the child in a flirtations way. Some parents are confused about how to express affection to the child. A mother may nibble on her son’s ear and kiss him on the neck. She may push her breasts into his face and call him ‘her little lover boy.’ A father may massage his daughter’s leg or look at her in a desirous way. Parents should show affection in appropriate ways and avoid treating their child like a sexual object.”

This prescription is more in line with conventional views about child sexual abuse, and reveals only superficial familiarity with children. These “professionals” apparently “work” primarily with adults who rely on their fallible memories of childhood experience, rather than having extensive experience with children themselves. Children are very perceptive of emotions and moods. They may not know the names of emotions, but they perceive when someone feels positive or very positive, etc. toward the child. There is no sense in hiding or exaggerating the adult’s expression of feelings for the child.

What does “flirtatious” mean anyway? I don’t see any reason why a kiss on the neck should be considered less appropriate than a kiss on the cheek or the hand. I have seen a mother kiss a little boy on his neck in full public view and I didn’t feel it was inappropriate. Many parents kiss their children on the lips (including President Obama), and I don’t think that’s inappropriate.

These pretentious authors claim to be able to precisely calculate the appropriateness of a kiss depending on the location of the body, as if all children are the same, all kisses are the same, and all areas of the neck are the same. What measuring instrument did the authors use to arrive at that calculation? Many authors assert that massage of a daughter’s leg (as part of a full-body massage) is wholly appropriate; and what does “look at her in a desirous way” mean? What measuring instrument was used to determine that commandment of mental health?

Granted, parents should not exploit a child as a sexual object, i.e. as a means to satisfy the adult’s sexual needs. But children may benefit from watching adult models being “flirtatious” with each other, and adults looking at each other in a “desirous” way. Children may also benefit from engaging and participating in similar behavior as a form of play. That is how children learn to feel comfortable about their appearance, normal body functions and reactions, and normal behavior in mature interpersonal relationships.

“14) Staring at men or women in a sexual way while the child is present. Some fathers stare at women’s’ breasts or buttocks and some women eye men’s crotches or chests while in the presence of their child. This behavior is not appropriate around children. “

This prescription clearly contradicts 12, and may be a direct result of hiding the breasts and genital area. When kids grow up seeing nudity every day, they feel no desire to stare at those familiar body parts.

When parents refrain from modeling sexual interest or desire, are they not communicating to a child that sex is dirty, evil, or nasty? The authors claim that many parents are “confused,” but the authors’ contradictions seem to express their own symptoms of schizophrenia.

“15) Using poor judgment when taking a child into a public restroom. Some parents use poor judgment when taking their child into a public restroom. A mother may take her 3 year old son into a men’s restroom while other men are standing at the urinal. Not only is she violating the privacy of the men who are standing at the urinal, but if she is married, she is also violating her husband by looking at other men’s genitals.”

Is this another one of the authors’ attempts at comedy? The authors go on to elaborate this silly prescription, writing in bold type that a mother “should never go into a men’s restroom,” as if that would be extremely dangerous! The mother “should wait outside” [sic].

As for fathers and daughters, a little girl should “never” be taken into a men’s restroom. “There may be other men using the urinal which would expose her to seeing their genitals.” Oh my God, how tragic would that be? These “professionals” seem unaware that in Japan it is traditional for fathers to bring their daughters with them into public baths, where they are exposed to seeing their father’s and many other men’s genitals. No wonder traditional Japanese women grow up to become sex addicts???

Throughout the Western World there are thousands of naturist (nudist) families and hundreds of naturist resorts and beaches where children and adults see each other completely naked all day every day, but there are no reports of mass insanity from so many children seeing normal human anatomy.

I’m much more concerned about the epidemic of emotional incest today, in which many parents try to control a child’s every thought, word, and deed, keeping children under constant surveillance, prisoners in their own homes, for the parents’ own enjoyment of absolute power.

The authors state in conclusion that crossing “any” of the so-called boundaries listed is “sexual abuse,” that children should be reminded every 3-6 months to report if anyone touches them – “especially their genitals” (so children won’t feel that sex is evil or nasty???), and when in doubt: “It is always better to refrain from doing something than to do that something which can cause harm.”

I would conclude that there is enormous room for doubt about almost everything these authors have written, and to follow that last bit of superficial and self-contradictory advice: Refrain from actively terrorizing your children against sex, and instead allow them to satisfy their natural curiosity and love of learning through play if they so choose. Respecting children entails allowing them to choose their own boundaries, whenever there is no obvious or verifiable risk of imminent harm, rather than dictating arbitrary boundaries that poorly informed “professionals” choose, as if there is verifiable scientific data to support such arrogant claims.

1)   When Are We Crossing A Child’s Sexual Boundaries? (1999) By Blythe Daniel, M.A. and David Daniel, M.A. http://www.wethechildren.com/boundriesenglish.htm (last accessed 1 December 2012) I attempted to contact the authors at the email address provided, but my message came back marked: “This mailbox is no longer active.”

2)   The Family Bed (2002) by Tine Thevenin.

3)   Overstimulation: the Devil in Disguise? http://sexhysteria.wordpress.com/2012/10/01/overstimulation-the-devil-in-disguise/

4)   Forbidden History: The State, Society, and the Regulation of Sexuality in Modern Europe. (1992) by John C. Fout.

5)   It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex and Sexual Health. (2009) by Robie H. Harris.

The concept of “overstimulation” entails the assumption that there is a normal (in the sense of healthy) level of stimulation, otherwise we could simply call the culprit “stimulation” without the “over” prefix. There may possibly even be an insufficient level: under-stimulation. In general there is little doubt that some stimulation is harmless or beneficial to the body and brain, and it’s difficult to overestimate the benefit of regular exercise to physical and mental health.

A normal amount of sexual stimulation may be considered that which an individual tolerates without ill effects or may even benefit from. Stimulation that doesn’t upset the person’s equilibrium or interfere with homeostasis may be considered normal. In some cases other internal or external conditions may upset equilibrium (provoking anger, fear, sadness or anxiety), and as far as we know some sexual stimulation may help restore equilibrium.

Some research on task performance indicates there is an optimum level of general arousal: neither too much nor too little. The same may be true of sexual arousal. A person may be considered over-stimulated when the resulting level of desire or arousal is a distraction from more important immediate needs. Note that there are many non-sexual distractions in daily life, such as music, sports, and scholastic competition, but we don’t outlaw them with threats of draconian penalties. Conversely, a person may be considered under-stimulated when the resulting desire or arousal is insufficient for a sexual response (in an appropriate time and place).

The amount of stimulation that can be considered innocuous or healthy may vary among different individuals, depending on prior experience (e.g. sensitization or desensitization), or possibly even genetic factors. As with inflammation and other well-known physiological processes, there may be a few individuals who are “hypersensitive” and overreact to what most individuals find an innocuous level of stimulation.

The most likely effect or symptom that indicates overstimulation might be stress and the subsequent fatigue after stress. During a stress response cascade due to a perceived threat (real or imagined) glucose is diverted to emergency uses and away from organs that are not essential in an emergency (e.g. sexual organs). Hence one possible sign of stress is a lack of sexual response when there should be one (in response to stimulation). Although sexual arousal is commonly considered a form of “tension” that is “released” through orgasm, we now know that sexual arousal requires calm, and in contrast tension or stress actually inhibit sexual arousal.

Stress can now be measured easily and non-invasively in the saliva (levels of cortisol or alpha amylase), so it is possible to monitor the effects of children’s spontaneous sex play. Lower levels of cortisol have been found in sexually functional women during arousal compared to women who are sexually dysfunctional (2). It is reasonable to predict that children’s stress levels may be much lower during and after sex play than in classrooms or other potentially stressful situations. (I have witnessed children literally scream upon exiting school.)

While overstimulation may cause stress, habitual normal stimulation may prevent or reduce the possible damage of chronic stress such as impaired development, immune-suppression, and (in mature individuals) infertility. Under-stimulation may possibly cause eventual dysfunction of the sexual organs due to the well-known mechanism of neural atrophy of relative brain areas after an organ has been under-stimulated during early development (see Clitoral Erectile Dysfunction). If under-stimulation leads to sexual dysfunction, it may be considered a risk factor in eventual self-destructive or socially destructive behavior.

In the final analysis the question of how much stimulation might be “too much” is an empirical question and can only be answered empirically. As far as I know the laws of most states don’t prohibit children from deep kissing or even tongue kissing, which is probably sexually arousing, so researchers could measure stress levels or other possible effects (if any) of sexual arousal without going near the genitals and running afoul of laws that treat the genitals as sacred. Nonetheless, theologically-minded members of research ethics committees might oppose such research (see below), though it might be enlightening to hear and confront the objections.

Aren’t children’s bodies extremely delicate? The skin covering the genitalia is unusually soft and smooth, lacking the pronounced friction ridges common on other areas of skin. So the genitals can tolerate a lot of contact and rubbing without the risk of discomfort, irritation or abrasion, compared to rubbing other areas of skin characterized by more pronounced friction ridges. Although immature skin is vulnerable to laceration and infection, it has an exceptional capacity for repair (see Learning about Love) compared to the skin of mature people or the aged.

The nerve endings in a baby’s genital area (even the testicles) can tolerate a lot of pressure and even impact without feeling pain or sustaining injury. That seems to be a built-in way to protect infants from the rough handling of their parents or siblings as well as possible falls. But a child’s genital area eventually becomes highly sensitive to both painful and pleasurable contact. The ability to experience pain is a way to warn the body to avoid harmful kinds of contact (e.g. temperature extremes). Why do the immature genitals have the ability to experience pleasure?

The nerves of the genitals respond to stimulation differently from other parts of the body. If you suck hard on your fingertip, the sensation will be irritating: the more you suck on your fingertip, the more irritating it feels. But if someone sucks hard on the tip of your penis, the sensation is very pleasurable: the more it is sucked, the more intense the pleasure until the ecstasy of orgasm. The body reacts similarly (favorably) to some harmful drugs, but unlike harmful chemicals, sexual stimulation is not characterized by tolerance (larger and larger doses needed to achieve satisfaction), dependency with withdrawal syndrome if you stop (vomiting, etc.), or overdose.

Babies usually receive a lot of stimulating contact from adults and siblings, but as some babies reach toddlerhood they go through a period in which they tend to resist handling. Some time after toddlerhood most children become receptive to skin contact again, but parents and other adults become inhibited about physical affection with children. A common response to a little girl wanting to sit on her father’s lap is “But you’re a big girl now.” A doctor has written that when she was a child she became furious when her father told her that 12 is “too old” to sit on his lap anymore. Young children derive satisfaction from sitting on a teacher’s lap, but some school policies now prohibit that (3). Eventually many older kids conform to cultural expectations and resist or reject physical affection themselves, or at least they pretend to reject it in public.

One of the most common expressions of irrational fear of stimulation is that parents and other adults have no qualms about a child hugging, caressing and kissing furry toys or pets. But if a child attempts the same contact with another child or adult the parents react with upset and even anger. Although pets may be dirty carriers of parasites, and children risk scratches or bites, such physical affection with non-human animals is widely considered perfectly acceptable. We are reminded of the cruel experiments with a baby monkey isolated and thereby having no alternative but to clutch a wire-model covered with soft cloth.

A young child sometimes engages in self-stimulation by rubbing his genital area against the edges of furniture, open doors, etc., and some parents are tolerant of that. But if the child attempts self-stimulation by rubbing his genital area against another child or adult, the parents usually react with some degree of hostility, ranging from mild disapproval all the way to outright horror. Interestingly, some parents caress their children’s buttocks, but strongly disapprove of other children or non-parents doing the same. That is apparently an expression of parental jealousy rather than a fear of overstimulation.

By maturity an aversion to touch is usually entrenched, and attempts to excuse and justify touch aversion often boil down to: “I have no qualms about stimulating contact; it’s just that I only want to be touched by my mother or Prince Charming.” Hence the endless search for “romantic love” as the only legitimate justification for enjoying stimulation. Some suggest that sexual activity is often an expression of the need for stimulating skin contact rather than a need for sexual satisfaction (4).

A possible benefit of overstimulation is desensitization. Once I was on a long-distance bus and had the pleasure of observing a girl (about 11) interacting with her brother (about 9). She continuously touched, hugged, squeezed and kissed the boy, with no objections from him. Quite the contrary, he seemed to be actively provoking her to do so. About once every minute or so the boy kissed their mother, and the girl responded by kissing him (on the cheek, ear, head, neck, back, arm), so it’s hard to imagine that he didn’t know he was pressing his sister’s button. Was she expressing love, or just playing? Older sibs often act as teachers for the younger ones, and it seemed to me that she was instinctively trying to build up his resistance to overstimulation through practice.

I won’t consider theological theories about demons and the devil being involved in the child’s desire and capacity for genital pleasure, but such theories may very well be the origin of traditional cultural taboos and 100-year-old laws against early genital stimulation and the supposed “trauma” of overstimulation (5). We should note that aversion to touching a child’s genitals (even possible indirect stimulation through clothing) is actively taught and passively modeled, as well as being prohibited with threats of draconian penalties.

It’s difficult to explain such a ferocious attitude without a theological origin. We may concede that the pleasures of the flesh certainly threaten to distract humanity from spiritual concerns. But when some individuals have a fanatical attitude against touch, advocating laws against as many forms of touch as possible, with government enforcement and severe punishment for “inappropriate” or “shameful” stimulation (as if the future of civilization depends on everybody keeping their distance), that should be considered touch phobia or touch hysteria.

Although there are obviously many different kinds and degrees of stimulation, most state laws make no such distinctions. Characteristically of phobia or hysteria, any and all contact with immature genitals, even the most brief and superficial, is feared as a kind of trepass on sacred ground.

Some authors have convincingly described the importance of skin contact, citing the benefits of touch to health and happiness from birth through old age (4,6). Nonetheless, there is a strong current in Western culture to be suspicious and fearful of innocent forms of stimulating contact, such as full-body nude massage, and the possibility of supposedly dangerous sexual arousal or unspecified “overstimulation” resulting from them.

Several authors have attempted to cultivate more acceptance of skin contact by specifically promoting baby and child massage (7,8,9). We know that massage reduces cortisol. Regular full-body massage of young children is also useful for early diagnosis of solid tumors like neuroblastoma, which has a dismally low survival rate if diagnosed late – as it usually is. Unfortunately, we are being viciously attacked by opportunists in the rescue business who profit by persuading people to believe any skin contact children may experience during childhood is probably a form of harmful “sexual abuse,” neglecting to mention the counter-evidence (10).  

Like magic, the age difference of playmates is claimed to be highly relevant: same age playmates, bad; 1-3 years difference, very bad; more than 3 years difference, “messed up for life.” (See Sex Play, Sex Acts, and Sex Abuse.) Hence a steady supply of potential customers for paid “counseling” and other forms of rescue services that have never been demonstrated to be effective or safe according to the standards required of medical treatment.

1. See my review of “The Courage to Heal…” http://sexhysteria.wordpress.com/2012/04/15/the-courage-to-heal-a-critical-review/
2. Hamilton, L.D. et al. Cortisol, sexual arousal, and affect in response to sexual stimuli. J Sex Med 2008;5:2111–2118.
3. Tobin, Joseph (ed.) Making a Place for Pleasure in Early Childhood Education. Yale, 1997.
4. Montague, Ashley. Touching: the Human Significance of the Skin. 1986.
5. Fout, John C. (ed.) “Forbidden History: The State, Society, and the Regulation of Sexuality in Modern Europe.” Univ. Chicago Press, 1992.
6. Atkinson, Mary. Healing Touch for Children: Massage, Acupressure and Reflexology Routine for Children Aged 4-12. (Gaia, 2009)
7. Auckett, Amelia. Baby Massage: Parent-Child Bonding Through Touch. William Morrow, 2001.
8. Jelveus, Lena. Swedish Child Massage: A Family Guide to Nurturing Touch. Swedish Health Institute, 2004.
 9. Adamo, Frank. Real Child Safety. www.books4parents.org
10. Rind et al. A Meta-Analytic Examination of Assumed Properties of Child Sexual Abuse Using College Samples (Psychological Bulletin 1998, Vol. 124, No. 1, 22-53); and Rind et al. The Validity and Appropriateness of Methods, Analyses, and Conclusions in Rind et al. (1998): A Rebuttal of Victimological Critique From Ondersma et al. (2001) and Dallam et al. (2001) (Psychological Bulletin 2001. Vol. 127. No. 6. 734-758).

 Image copyright © 2011 Frank Adamo

 One of my earliest memories is standing up in my crib and seeing my father and mother through the doorway nude in the kitchen. If that seems like an unusually early memory, I also remember how I used to say “down the cellar” (dun-ga-lauw), and other baby talk. Other early memories abound. Unfortunately, I was an only child so I had no sex play with siblings at home. But when I was in kindergarten I remember running around with the other boys and sneaking up behind the girls to lift up their skirts. The girls laughed and didn’t express any anger the first few times, but eventually one said: “Stop that or I’ll tell the teacher!” So we stopped. To what extent my interest in girls was romantic might be doubted, but in first grade a classmate said “Hi handsome!” to me, and I remember I used to imagine entering the colorful illustrations of children in our readers, so I could kiss the girls. I also remember a classmate confiding that sometimes his penis “curls up.” I felt perplexed and I still have no idea what he meant. I had three female cousins (3-8 years older) who used to take me and my male cousin (six months older than me) to the public pool in the summer, and I remember them taking us into the girls’ changing room to change our clothes.

 I once asked my mom where babies come from and she said: a mother’s abdomen. I asked how they get out, and she said: a doctor cuts them out. That was all she told me. My first real exposure to sexual information was through the jokes that children hear and repeat, often necessitating that we guess the meaning. A popular joke was about a beautiful actress from the big city whose car breaks down in a rural area and has to spend the night with a farm family. She propositions the farmer’s two young sons, who don’t know anything about contraception. When they agree to have sex with her, she puts condoms on them and says: “This is to prevent me from getting pregnant.” The next day she returns to the big city, never to be seen again. A few days later the two young brothers are working in the fields when one says: “I don’t care if she gets pregnant – I’m taking this damn thing off!” I don’t remember how much of the joke I actually understood at the time, but I think I got the general picture.

I don’t remember when I first heard the expression “blow-job,” but I knew what it meant – more or less. When I was six years old my parents separated, and they divorced two years later. I guess it was probably during my parents’ separation that my mom used to fondle my little penis in the evening while we watched TV. I remember becoming erect and she exposed me to look at my little erection. On at least one occasion I asked her to put her mouth on it, which she did. I then said “Now blow,” which she did also. I remember raising my arms and throwing my head back in an expression of delight. The fondling, oral stimulation and subsequent pleasure seemed perfectly natural and innocent to me at the time; there was no shame on my part.

In the second grade a boy in my class used to come over to my house after school, before my mother came home from work, and we played rape (we took turns being the girl), or Cowboys and Indians in the nude. We felt each other’s genitals and “blew” each other, but I don’t remember any kissing. He said that he liked my penis more than other boys, and although I felt no inhibition about boy-on-boy contact, we both married women when we grew up.

Boys in the second grade confided in each other who our favorite eighth grade girl was. At one point we entertained ourselves by saying “I love you!” to older (teenage?) girls we saw on the street, or even “How about a kiss?” Some of the older girls expressed surprise at our budding boldness, while others laughed or even blew us kisses. I think we enjoyed the shock value rather than actually hoping an older girl might really kiss us.

A teenage boy in the neighborhood once showed me and my male cousin a science book with an illustration of sexual anatomy at the teenager’s house (age uncertain: 7-8?). After an advanced explanation of sexual reproduction the older boy proposed touching us. We both refused, and my cousin left. But I stayed and the teenager offered me some money to touch me. I refused again, until he raised his offer to what seemed like a lot of money. I finally agreed, but when he reached down to expose me I changed my mind and left too.

Later that evening he came to my apartment but my mother wouldn’t let him in, which might have been a mistake. Maybe he wanted to apologize and reassure me that I don’t have to be afraid of him, or maybe he intended to raise his offer. I think I was afraid on account of his apparent anxiety in propositioning me, but I also regretted the missed opportunity to earn some hard cash.

Another neighbor boy my own age explained masturbation in simple terms, describing orgasm as “the thrill.” I was skeptical but I went home and tried masturbating myself. Believe it or not, I counted 10 powerful orgasms in the space of about an hour, before my little organ developed a friction blister (age uncertain: 9-10?). The orgasms were very pleasurable and similar to adult orgasms in every way, except that they were less intense, shorter in duration, and there was no white ejaculate, only a drop or two of clear seminal fluid. After a few days my blister healed and I began masturbating myself to orgasm a few times a day, every day, usually after school, either alone or with my cousin or other boys my own age. The scene in Fellini’s autobiographical film “Amarcord” in which four boys masturbate together, is quite realistic.

In the sixth grade I remember a classmate drawing a picture of herself wearing a bikini, with an arrow pointing to the suit bottom exposing her navel with the word “low.” I think it was the same year when I had my first “girlfriend.” A neighbor girl and I acknowledged that we liked each other and kissed each other on the lips. But another girl I liked (the one who had said “I’ll tell the teacher!” in kindergarten) rejected me in favor of another boy, which disappointed me immensely.

When I was 12 my mom and I moved to a new neighborhood where a boy my age claimed the girls around there “give.” He wasn’t lying. He eventually introduced me to several girls aged 9 to 14, and we enjoyed group sex play on numerous occasions – mostly looking, touching and play-intercourse without real penetration. I was fascinated by the feel of the girls’ soft skin, and I loved the interpersonal play with the girls. The group activities were made up of 2-4 girls + 2-4 boys; and there were also two other girls who only engaged in sex play with one boy at a time, for a total of about 10 children altogether. Once in a cinema the youngest girl (9) in our group sat between my neighbor and I, and she masturbated us both under our jackets at the same time. It was definitely the most exciting period of my childhood. I finally told my mother I was old enough to bathe myself now (without further explanation). She seemed a little surprised, but she didn’t object.

In the beginning of the childish orgies there was some discussion about which boys would be with which girls, but we eventually took turns. Although I had my preferences (the taller and more mature girls), I felt no desire for attachment, and I didn’t see the absence of romance with any particular individual as a problem. I enjoyed myself without any emotional complications. I loved everybody!

There was quite an ethnic mix. The oldest girl (14) of apparently WASP origin lived on the very edge of the white/black divide (what a real estate agent called “the combat zone”), and her family had some conflicts with black neighbors so she refused to let a black boy touch her. One day he eventually insisted and tore her blouse. She went home and told her family, who called the police. When the black boy was interrogated, he evidently defended himself by revealing what was going on in the neighborhood. When the police reported that to the parents, the girl (or her parents) claimed that we boys had all “forced” her to participate in sex play (repeatedly over the course of months or years?).

A mass investigation then followed, in which several children were interrogated in the principal’s offices of schools, and at the police station. We boys were stunned at being falsely accused, and terrified that we might be sent to juvenile prison, but the police eventually decided no force was involved so there was no formal charge or court hearing. Nonetheless, all the girls in the neighborhood became prisoners in their own homes, and we boys resigned ourselves to isolation from girls.

Despite all my early sexual activity I reached puberty late. In high school I was shorter than my age-mates, and girls became more selective. I became obsessed with one girl who I wanted to marry, but she rejected me in favor of an older boy. I eventually realized my fixation on her wasn’t “grown up” but infantile. I had few other intimate relationships with girls in high school, one of which included another visit by the police. When I was 17 I had a girlfriend who was 16. There was a lot of deep kissing and touching of breasts and genitals, and one night we attended a late concert and told our parents we would be spending the night at friends’ homes (“not together”). In reality after the concert we spent the rest of the night in my car in an empty parking lot. Our steamed-up windows drew the attention of a passing patrol car.

The police probably radioed in my license plate number and found out it was registered to a minor. They approached my car with their headlights off, got out silently, and suddenly shined their flashlights in my windows on both sides of the car. We were partially undressed and got dressed as quickly as possible. I saw a badge presented so I rolled down the window and they told us to get out of the car, which we did. One cop questioned me on one side of the car, while the other cop questioned my girlfriend on the other side. I was asked how old I was, how old she was, and if I was “in her.” I answered truthfully: 17, 16, and No, I wasn’t in her. My girlfriend was more imaginative and said she was 18, and she didn’t have any I.D. to prove her wrong. The police told us to go home. I didn’t have full genital intercourse for the first time until I was 18 (with a 19-year-old girlfriend).

After high school I read about the theory that early sexual experience is usually (always?) “traumatic,” so I succumbed to the temptation to ignore the many imperfections in my complex development (e.g. absent father) and instead blame all my problems on my mom fondling me. I dropped out of college at 19, and saw a psychiatrist who lent support to my temptation to be simplistic, calling my mother a “monster” and claiming her casual stimulation was “the kiss of death.” But I eventually realized he was one of the many quacks who was cashing in on the “early sexual trauma” myth. There was no valid evidence that early sexual experience between different age groups is usually seriously harmful, and there is now some strong evidence against that belief.*

My early upbringing was certainly inadequate, but I eventually realized it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to know and verify what early childhood experience “causes” later feelings or behavior. Although I was estranged from my mother for several years during my early adulthood, I went back to my hometown when she got very old and was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and took care of her myself. Even when doctors tried to put her in a nursing home, I fought to keep her out. I stayed with her until the stressful end-stage when she no longer knew who I was, and I spread her ashes on a mountaintop.

Although my memory might not be 100% accurate, and some readers might even question my honesty, those are potential problems in any self-report of childhood experience. I haven’t embellished this description with fiction or drama, and have left out most of my childhood, but the point is that despite my very early and fairly extensive sexual experience, including what is popularly considered “significant, long-term, incestuous abuse,” I have never “repressed” my early sexual memories, never “split” into multiple personalities, never became gay or pedophile, etc.

I eventually went back to college and graduated, and as a teacher for 20 years I have seen children’s innocent sex play right in the classroom, and have recorded their sexual talk and jokes, some of which make my own childhood memories seem tame. One eleven-year-old girl recorded the joke about a little girl who sees her father undressed, and asks what his male organ is. The father tells her it’s his doll. After the father goes to bed to take a nap, the daughter decides to play with his doll. When the man wakes up, he notices that his genital area is inflamed and wet. “What have you done?” He asks his daughter. She explains: “I was playing with your doll when it suddenly spit in my face, so I pulled its hair.” Some of the other things I have recorded are so politically incorrect that most people probably wouldn’t believe they were spontaneous statements even if critics heard the recordings themselves.

I read the popular literature on incest and was skeptical about many of the reports, so I wrote to one author asking for verification but received no reply. I once planned to write a book myself on incest and solicited reports from victims in North America and Europe. One young woman sent me a tape in which she described her years of sexual activity with her father, and the subsequent break-up of her family. I asked her if I could interview her other family members to hear their sides of the story, but she refused. An interesting thing about the tape is that the first five minutes or so are a calm, dispassionate description of the years of sex, while the next 20 minutes of the tape are a dramatic, tearful description of the day she revealed the secret to her mother, and the explosive aftermath. I wonder how much grief I saved myself and my family by never revealing my mother’s fondling when I was still growing up. The lack of response to my ads seeking incest victims, as well as the incongruous telling in the tape described above, lead me to suspect that at least some of the popular literature on incest is embellished with fictional stories.

Nowadays there are excellent sex education books and videos for children that explain almost everything about the subject. Some, like the series produced for French TV by Folimage-Valence “The Tree of Life,” 1992, which has been dubbed into other languages and is available at newsstands in Europe, feature beautiful graphics, animated characters, and pleasing music, and are intended for kids from age 4. Children also need to learn about the importance of consent, and to avoid witch hunts later there should be parental consent as well, and ideally even legislative reform. Accurate, balanced and comprehensive sex education should be an essential part of children’s general education. How sad and incredible that many parents and teachers today choose to reject sex education, in part due to the distorted popular image of early sexual experience.

*Rind et al. “A Meta-Analytic Examination of Assumed Properties of Child Sexual Abuse Using College Samples” (Psychological Bulletin 1998, Vol. 124, No. 1, 22-53); and Rind et al. “The Validity and Appropriateness of Methods, Analyses, and Conclusions in Rind et al. (1998): A Rebuttal of Victimological Critique From Ondersma et al. (2001) and Dallam et al. (2001)” (Psychological Bulletin 2001. Vol. 127. No. 6. 734-758).

The film parrots standard slogans and rhetoric: “children don’t know” about sex until someone “steals their innocence.” The dramatic music and horror movie sound effects serve no purpose than to cultivate the mood of fear this film wants to provoke. Vicious and blatantly groundless accusations are made against the courageous and pioneering scientist, Alfred Kinsey. The narrator claims the foundations of our nation are “Christian principles.” Bogus figures on missing children are quoted to terrify viewers  by exaggerating the risk of stranger abduction. Instead of quoting national statistics on child injury and fatality, an obscure “estimate” of child abductions is repeated more than once to mislead viewers about the most frequent and most deadly dangers children face. A self-interested author quotes the hysterical parent of a victim as saying “Your child could be next,” as if that’s a reliable source to calculate the actual probability of danger.

Prosecutors and other self-interested non-experts are quoted making silly and irrelevant emotional statements like “Your child can disappear in an instant.” The narrator repeats what a prosecutor claims: that abused children are “scarred forever,” and “messed up for life,” as if he’s a medical doctor as well as a prosecutor. The discredited claim that children who were sexually abused “often lead troubled lives” is merely repeated without mentioning the counter-evidence.*

The film makes no distinction between “pedophiles” and child molesters. It makes false claims about the supposedly high rate of recidivism of “pedophiles,” without acknowledging (or unaware) that one of the world’s leading authorities on pedophilia says not only do sex offenders against children have a relatively low rate of recidivism, an estimated half of sex offenders against children aren’t even pedophiles (many are actually psychopaths who prefer adult sex partners).** The film later contradicts itself by claiming that most pedophiles are never caught. How does anyone know that? If we don’t have access to most pedophiles, how can we make valid generalizations about them as a group?

The narrator refers to “us as a society” as if everyone is in agreement about the supposed need for terror. He quotes a law firm as saying the supposed increase of sex offenses against children is “directly tied” to the increase of pornography on the web. Since when is a law firm an expert on the alleged (supposedly causal) relationship between pornography on the web and sex offenses? Even a former porn star is quoted for her valuable opinion on the supposedly causal connection between porn and sex offenses against children. (She and a former pornographer later testify how God saves.)

Sensationalist journalists are shown making groundless claims like “the average child molester” has more than 100 victims, and quotes one hysteric (Judith Reisman) who claims, incredibly, that much of the current “horror show” can be traced back to the scientist Kinsey. She quotes the old conspiracy theory (with only token support) that organizations like the Rockefeller Foundation wanted to corrupt America’s “Christian principles” by any means necessary.

Rather than trying to prove the silly claim that Kinsey was largely or solely responsible for the supposed increase in child sexual abuse later, the film goes on to attack the validity of Kinsey’s pioneering research. Most incredibly, Kinsey’s research is criticized for selection bias because he included convicted sex offenders and prostitutes as part of his population sample. While that criticism may very well be justified, this film nowhere mentions that the multitude of research claiming that child sexual abuse is usually seriously harmful was no less guilty of selection bias by including patients in therapy as part (if not all) of their study populations. According to this film, selection bias is bad (or “scientific fraud”) only if your opponents do it.

Note that we are talking about early sex research done in the 1940s and 1950s, compared to sex abuse research as recent as the1990s. Nor does this film mention another type of bias created by the political correctness police: publication bias. For a long time it has been very difficult if not impossible to obtain any funding to conduct and publish impartial child sexuality research, regardless of who applies for it.

Much footage is devoted to Kinsey’s survey of children’s sexual experience, quoting Judith Reisman who hysterically claims he was “responsible” for the sexual abuse of hundreds if not thousands of children. In reality, the data in question were claimed (by Kinsey and co-researchers) to have come from several child molesters long after the fact. A recent director of the Kinsey Institute says he believes only one child molester provided the data, and Kinsey’s claim of several molesters was intended to protect his source (just as a journalist’s privilege, lawyer/client, doctor/patient, etc.). But regardless of the number of Kinsey’s sources, none of the film’s long discussion proves Reisman’s accusation that Kinsey was “responsible” for any child molestation (let alone hundreds or thousands), or that the data (regardless of the number of sources) were not accurate. The film contradicts itself again by quoting another propaganda film that claims an outside scientist (not part of Kinsey’s research team) trained the molester to record his data.

The reports that some children enjoyed their sexual experiences are called “shocking” by the narrator. Reisman suggests that children having orgasms is torture, and it would be impossible for a four-year-old to have 26 orgasms within 24 hours, as reported in Kinsey’s book. (Reisman should read my forthcoming blog post about my own childhood.) On the basis of my personal experience of my own childhood orgasms I would agree with Kinsey’s critics that some of his book’s description of orgasms in young children is hard to believe. Orgasm in childhood is a normal and natural response to stimulation, and not at all as dramatic as either Kinsey or his hysterical critics claim. I am not claiming any observations; I am speaking from the horse’s mouth.

The film claims a crucial point is that Kinsey and his researchers must have encouraged pedophiles to molest children and record their observations carefully, but despite a lot of effort attempting to prove that point (Kinsey researchers are accused of “word play,” and actors posing as scientists are shown giving stopwatches to other actors posing as dirty old men, accompanied by dramatic music), a Kinsey co-worker and former director of the Kinsey Institute flatly denies any such thing, and convincingly explains that the pedophile(s) were not encouraged nor trained to do anything. Only parents and child care workers who observed children spontaneously playing by themselves were encouraged to record their observations carefully.

This propaganda film wouldn’t be complete without a pseudonymous victim claiming recovered memories. A woman says she was molested by her father with a stopwatch when she was a child, and she claims the father boasted that he had helped Kinsey’s research. She only remembered or realized what had happened years later. Although she claims her mother didn’t know about it at the time, the latter reportedly corroborated the woman’s accusations – an inconsistency the film sees no need to explain.

A truly bizarre part of this story is the revelation that after WWII, Kinsey had reportedly corresponded with a former Nazi in Germany who was later arrested for the possible murder of a child during the war in occupied Poland. But the narrator tries to confuse the time period with ambiguous verb tenses that suggest the crimes were in progress during Kinsey’s post-war correspondence. The evidence for molestation was evidently the molester’s diaries which he kept during the war, and yet the narrator in this film keeps saying Kinsey corresponded with the man who “was molesting” children, rather than saying he “had been molesting” or “used to molest” children. The former Nazi is also repeatedly called a “Nazi,” even though the time period referred to is clearly the 1950s. Once a Nazi always a Nazi?

Kinsey’s letters are said to have encouraged the man to “continue his research,” but no evidence is offered that by that phrase he meant molest more children, nor is any evidence presented that any more children were in fact molested. Instead, the viewer is presented with images of an actor wearing a Nazi uniform complete with swastika armband, accompanied by dramatic music. At the end of this part of the story, the narrator stops playing word games himself and says in no uncertain terms: the “Nazi’s” crimes took place during the war (not during Kinsey’s post-war correspondence).

The film makes another weak attempt at guilt-by-association in Kinsey’s efforts to obtain the diaries of the infamous occultist Aleister Crowley in Europe. Kinsey’s motto “Do your best and let other people react as they will,” is likened to Crowley’s motto “Do what thou wilt, shall be the whole of the law.” Hardly a close resemblance. Complaining that Kinsey’s research influenced the modernization of sex laws, this film neglects to mention that many sex laws date back to the 1800s. Is that the enlightened period we should forever consider a model of legal wisdom?

Calling anyone under 18 “children,” and labeling Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner as Kinsey’s “pamphleteer,” the film brings Reisman back to make the arrogant and ridiculous claim that Playboy and similar magazines must be arousing, and arousal must be acted out in violent sex crimes. “That’s just the way the human brain works,” Reisman declares. Despite the certainty with which the supposed link between pornography and crime is asserted, only the weakest arguments are offered as evidence, e.g. sex crimes increased during the 1960s, the same period in which Playboy became very popular, which is like saying the increase in coffee drinking is responsible for the increase in sexual abuse because both occurred during the same decade. No hard scientific evidence for the supposed porn-crime link is mentioned.

Another contradiction: After arguing that viewing porn creates a sex addiction, Reisman claims viewing porn desensitizes people to sex. I’m glad she finally got it right. The self-righteous saviors of children’s purity are unbound by logic, and amidst the shame over child sexual abuse, they are shameless in presenting this propaganda film as honest, dispassionate analysis. The film concludes by claiming Kinsey’s death was a masochistic suicide, and although I’m unable to verify or dispute that claim, the claim does nothing to discredit the courageous and pioneering work Kinsey did during his life, and his work’s possible contribution to the revolution in popular attitudes that previously censored open discussion of human sexuality and healthy sexual development.

Compared to his European predecessors (Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, Freud), Alfred Kinsey was more open-minded and much more scientific. Kinsey was not perfect, but he marked a clear and precious historical transition from sexual philosophy and moral indoctrination to sexual science and balanced education. Despite blatant propaganda films like this one, we are still making progress on that road.

*Rind et al. “A Meta-Analytic Examination of Assumed Properties of Child Sexual Abuse Using College Samples” (Psychological Bulletin 1998, Vol. 124, No. 1, 22-53); and Rind et al. “The Validity and Appropriateness of Methods, Analyses, and Conclusions in Rind et al. (1998): A Rebuttal of Victimological Critique From Ondersma et al. (2001) and Dallam et al. (2001)” (Psychological Bulletin 2001. Vol. 127. No. 6. 734-758).

**Seto, Michael C. “Pedophilia and Sexual Offending Against Children: Theory, Assessment and Intervention.” (American Psychological Association, 2007).