Good Sex Illustrated (11 page)

“Did we do that?” say
the children, astounded.

What a useful discovery! In the few lines of a story, you’ve shown that a child’s desire is bad—“instinctively” incestuous, selfish and cruel; that heterosexuality, conjugality, the need for sexual ownership over others are spontaneous and universal; that sons’ hate for their fathers is a pathetic amorous jealousy, that a balanced older boy shouldn’t feel it, because it would prove that he’s still a baby, that he’s sick; that “Mom,” wife and mother, is the center of the world; that the solitary confinement of children under the authority of their parents and the erotic bell jar created by it, with its inequalities and prohibitions, is a natural and unavoidable stage in the destiny of every human.

The wonder is that the oedipal situation no longer seems anything but a string of crimes that the little child wanted to commit, and not the consequence of the conflict of impulses inflicted upon him by this parents. But in recounting the tale of Oedipus as if it were an “instinctive” and inevitable phenomenon, we legitimize that small socio-cultural horror known as the modern Western family—a kind of psychosexual cannibalism among three or four starving people tarred with the same brush. And we teach that desire has its original sin, and that therefore it must be corrected, controlled, directed, redeemed in order for it to become good.
Did we do that?
Afraid so, every human is born guilty, dreams only of murder and incest: if we hadn’t forbidden you certain things, take a little look at where you would have been, you poor little wretches!

I’m not concerned with critiquing the oedipal pattern itself, the way in which psychoanalysis constructed it and the way it has been pulled totally to pieces since then: what interests me is the role that this pattern has been made to play when it is recounted to children—and this role is hateful. It reminds us that sexology is onlyinterested in Freudianism to borrow from it new tools of family-centric indoctrination and the repression of desire.

Therefore, if the child forgets, conveniently conceals his sex and plays the oedipal game wholeheartedly, he’ll be rewarded with affection, respect, flattery from Dad-Mom; he’ll be fed, protected, hugged, rarely beaten; but if not, there will be persecution, pain, war. This is the second stage of libidinal misappropriation: you’ll love us enough to desire and beg for what we’ll give you—but you won’t desire us too much, and, above all, you won’t desire any other person on the outside. This is a deal for survival: the child who doesn’t subscribe to it risks his hide. Unfortunately, I’m not referring to a metaphor: refusing the oedipal bargain means nothing less than attracting bad treatment that goes so far as murder. The infanticide committed by parents—on those of their offspring of “oedipal” age—has today actually become one of the very first causes of infant mortality. At the end of this chapter, I’ll return to this monstrous aspect of family reality, whose importance few have had the daring to reveal to us—especially in France, where parental power and its crimes are better protected than anywhere else.

Last stage of the libidinal harnessing of children: any occasion for extrafamilial pleasure (being seduced by friends, by images, by writings, by adult strangers) will be denounced, forbidden, morally stigmatized, prevented by laws and in reality almost impossible; it will be the capital offence, and the child knows that there is no excuse and no pity for it. No sex outside, no sex inside: work-family for the child, while the barracks teaches his big brothers the meaning of the homeland.

The family in the
Encyclopedia
play at being nudists; so the little boy walks around with his prick exposed to the air, if not up in the air. But Mom, in the mode of right-thinking Freudian,describes the detrimental consequences of certain “regressions” to which children poorly integrated into the family would be prey:

…All of you are sure about our affection! [But when a] child feels abandoned, he continues to live like a baby, know what I mean? He’s capable of doing anything to get attention… Even opening his fly in public!

Thus, there’s a situation when a child is allowed to show his cock, it’s good, it’s a proof of mental health; and another situation when it’s so bad that the guilty party must be immediately dragged to a psychotherapist, that courageous policeman of flies in revolt. Family nudity is innocent, it isn’t done to “get attention”; however, in public nudity is perverse because it’s showing something. The penis shown according to dad-mom’s orders is a cut-off, missing pee-pee, whose very presence demonstrates its inexistence; the penis shown according to the child’s initiative is a cock, a real one, autonomous, aggressive, desiring.

By what roundabout means, actually, does a child, “deprived of affection,” open his fly in public? Is it really by means of it that you obtain another’s affection? That would be too choice, in fact. Marriage agencies would close up shop, and the advice columns would change their tune.

I see two levels of explanation for this kind of child’s behavior. You can show your prick either to suppress it, or to make it exist. Considering the sexual system for children, it’s probably that the majority of those who show their cock, far from being unbalanced, abandoned or unfortunate, do it from a naive hope, from pride and from desire: my dad, my mom, my brother, my sister don’t want my cock, what about you?—that is all that is meant by this fine gesture, and it’s a proof of great health, because it expresses the feet that such children aren’t guilty enough to refrain, nor oedipal enough to makedo with the very platonic family-style of fondling. But these kids scandalize; and their frank and innocent way of acknowledging that they desire to be desiring and desired will be called pathological.

In the same way, until the age of seven or eight, little children spontaneously express, with sensuality and an extreme eroticism, their liking for others; and it’s not that they are begging to be mothered by every Tom, Dick and Mary; it’s that their desire, immediately, crudely, invests itself in every affection that an older person’s inspires in them—and that they secretly hope that the sources of pleasure that are called neither mom nor dad won’t oppose their body with the oedipal flat refusal, which, through the prohibition of incest, teaches prohibition, plain and simple.

But since the
Encyclopedia
has denied the sexuality of the child, it refuses to interpret the display of it in terms of desire, autonomy, freedom. All it has left as explanation is a paltry pattern of regression. However, this will reveal the system of sexual alienation and the family-centric deal with which the child’s desire is struggling.

We have followed, on one hand, the description of a boy spoiled by parental affection, but who castrates himself for the right to it; and on the other hand, a boy “neglected” because his parents don’t love him and no one else has the right to love him. If he shows his cock in public, it’s for it to be cut off like all children’s and for him to receive, in compensation, his share of affection.

Little Jean, whose cock has been sacrificed to his family in exchange for tenderness, obeys that very law; and his innocence, his dreadful preadolescence, is actually a sign of the mutilating adaptation of his pleasures to the very specific erotic-castrator context that his parents are imposing upon him. That his penis is a detached, foreign object for him goes without saying, because that’s its only currency of exchange: give your prick (he has learned),you’ll get a sweet, a kiss, a day without trauma, one less spanking, some good sentiments, you’ll be fondled, your nice mom will hug her “big sulky boy” again.

In conformity with the logic of this deal, a kid who is feeling helpless will offer his excrements or his pee-pee, one way or another, to pay for the affective benefit that his family circle is refusing him. The little exhibitionist, who moves our mater-analyst to pity, is like a brat who has peed in bed: he reproduces an outmoded organic market deal, a giving-to-get that’s the first relationship to others that his parents have inculcated in him. He “continues to live like a baby,” in fact: but no more nor less than Jean, the boy who has adjusted, who is doing the same actions, making the same demand—only Jean has family partners who respect the laws that they’ve established. The child exhibitionist, on the other hand, is in a desert; he “plays” his part in the castration, but there is no one opposite him to take the complementary role; and he fails, becomes a delinquent, whereas the others, who succeed, are good, well-behaved children.

The truth is, in its specifically family-centric and oedipal quality, that deal is only for private use; for the purpose of theater, it requires a “harmonious” family, where the adults have the time, strength and inclination to gratify the child a lot. Among those nice middle class people educated by
Elle
, if not by
Lui,
the wife is emancipated and the husband is big brother; motherhood is peacefully incestuous, or even like being the madam of a brothel (you produce handsome, well-dressed, well-fed, well-washed children, who are photographed, shown on television, and who arouse everybody, but nobody can fondle them but mom, who, in short, plays cockteaser with her kids in between); and fatherhood is slyly pedophilic. As long as the sex organ is always absent. Always indicated, however, by the care with which serious parents and docilechildren take to avoid it, so that it’s a matter of conversations, sights or physical contact between big and small:

“Since Sylvie was very little,” says Jean, “you’ve always given in to her funny faces! ‘Give me a cuddle, Dad, ’” added the little boy, aping his sister.

“I
give in to your funny faces, too, my little wild man! Only with you, cuddles are more like fights… Obviously, between men…”
answers Dad.

What a fine example of a “polymorphously perverse” little boy put back on the straight and narrow by a father conscious of his duties. Pederasty satisfied and avoided at the same time by this pugnacious “cuddle” becomes for Dad, we see, a new way to teach his son the role-of-the-father. I sense with what excitement the authors, who “know,” among other things, that their young readers “are” slightly homosexual, have set up that pedophiliac scene to convince them that, in this case as well, the family will be involved, and that it’s useless to turn to one’s friends, to adult strangers: no matter how complaisant they are about “little wild ones’” “funny faces,” they wouldn’t teach either the role of the father, or that of the son—nor even that of the daughter, whatever they may say. You’ve got to avoid them. Besides, Dad has a lot more advantages: he’s right there, he’s tall, handsome, he has money, he’s got two babes under his heel and he lets you grope them a little, in fact he has the good taste to “allow” you to have it all while reminding you that “between men” you hit ’em, “obviously,” right on the kisser, just as fond Nature would have it, but that there are women there for the peace and quiet of these noble warriors. Women, really? For Jean and his funny faces? Uh, not right away: you have to earn the hole. Dad points at it like preachers indicate Paradise: it’s always beyond, and it’s by obeying that you buy the right to enter it. Notme or that, murmurs Dad with—all the same—a tender indulgence for the muddled and touching appetites of his little look-alike.

Look-alike? Not in age or body, but only by blood and sex—which is already too much, since, in order for two to taste pleasure, they have to be “complementary.” What does it mean to be “complementary”? Clearly, nobody knows a thing about it; it comes down to a nasty little calculation of similarities and differences. A screw “is” complementary to a nut, but a dog “isn’t” complementary to a cat, despite the fact that both of them have fur, teeth, ears that stick up and a tail that moves;
only, their cuddles are like fights,
since they’re of different breeds. However, there are a number of perverted dogs that run after cats, not to bite them but to sniff their hole and lick their muzzles affectionately. A cat’s soft, it smells good, it’s small, it goes fast, you marvel that it exists; cats marvel, too, they’re stunned that some goof with big paws and too long a nose is running his nostrils over their body. Perhaps “complementarity” is such an affinity, which isn’t concerned with race, age, sex or money. But all intercourse that ignores sex, age, race, money is damned by our society. Doctors, who aren’t the latest to add their yapping to the imprecations currendy in usage, have in this way defined the only kind of complementarity that the sexual order can allow: the one that produces children. It begins with sexes that are biologically complementary: but after that, how can a solid couple, a balanced home, a happy family be established if the parents aren’t of the same race, the same social roots, and don’t belong to the same generation? One exclusion leads to another, and from antihomosexuality to racism and age segregation, the step is so easy that doctors won’t take it themselves: it’s up to the reader to understand, for example from his neighbors, how to construct an orthodox type of happiness. This is how biological complementarity and social complementarity are confused; the second adds its ownshackles, discriminations, arbitrariness, infamies to the first, and all that becomes “natural” is what respects the ethnic, sexual and social prejudices of the good, well-intentioned people around you who’ve discovered those great truths during their latest soap opera or their last red wine.

The ideology of the complementarity of the sexes is by definition nonegalitarian, mercantile, characteristic of a society of exploitation. It demands that we base a number of cultural differences on the morphological and functional differences between men and women (and between children and adults); without this compartmentalization and these ploys, “good” sexuality collapses. The
Encyclopedia,
which wants to be democratic and sensitive to the demands of women, therefore attempts to teach sexual equality while at the same time preserving the established differences needed by its reactionary conception of the sexual order. During the entire dialogue, they pretend that Jean thinks of himself as superior to Sylvie and that his parents are demonstrating to him that he’s wrong—
what a new idea
(barely two centuries old, in fact)—and the pathetic text, which is as deft as a nice lady fighting racism by claiming that negroes aren’t all vicious, that Arabs wash as much as we, that there are generous Jews and virile queers, accumulates blunder after blunder: