Good Sex Illustrated (7 page)

I wouldn’t know how to better comment on these insanities than by paraphrasing them and moving from back to front.

Sex information for the child of 10 to 13 poses no problem for someone who has sex with him. Actually, very many children hide their interest in things having to do with the body from their family. The child no longer evidences any curiosity about the gynecological drivel of his parents: it’s pleasure that interests him, exclusively, and he has learned that he’d better not brag about it.

In reality, during this period, his desire has been asserted, focused, and has assessed outside prohibitions. He is seeking to satisfy himself despite schoolwork, and frequently thanks to camaraderie and to his first experiences, which are secret if not exciting: jerking off, little magazines, dirty words, voyeurism, buggering, ladies’ holes, etc.

The dialogue between parents and the child constitutes an insidious effort to reconsolidate the repressive adjustments that they’ve inflicted upon him from early childhood, and from which he’s striving to free himself. Shame, a sense of decency, shyness help him a little to protect himself from parental aggression. His basic problem, in fact, is the immediate domination and the incessant control leveled on him by adults. The child of 10–13 thus has as much sexuality as he can, and if he has begun to carefully conceal it from those near him, it’s often for the purpose of a lot of secret adventures, be they of any color.

No, I’m not claiming that “very many parents” have told me this, of course. I know it from the childhood of their children—and from mine and of the friends I had. At that age, whether or not you’re having sex, you’ve understood that you can’t recklessly exhibit your sexuality without risking losing it immediately—because parents, who are keeping an eye on their brats’ puberty, are more curious and more indiscreet, more vigilant and hurtful than ever. Fortunately, we generally attribute an innocence to children, and this serves as the best protection for their “guilty” pleasures. The civil war between adults and their offspring is declared only at the time of the first growth of body hair, the first spurt of jism or first menstruation. Until then, a child who isn’t too stupid or fearful, nor too much a prisoner of himself or others (which exists), can have an erotic life that is happier and richer than his parents’.

Among the majority of children, unfortunately, these ruses of desire hardly last: everything that has been put in place in the mind of the child continues to function, to come to a head, to devour his freedom and his life from the inside. This is because it’s desire itself that feeds the self-repression of desire; soon puberty will give this self-repression an extraordinary strength, and the body ravaged by this policing “storm” will no longer be anything but a sad desiring vestige. The maturation of the body awards, in some way, a second organic life to a function that has been ransacked and mutilated for a long time and in every manner. And the glandular thrills causing the trembling in this little pile of libidinal ruins that is the adolescent will go straight to die right where it’s been predicted that they would—in the latrines of preconjugal conditioning.

But let us remain, for a moment, on the “good” side of puberty. A child is supposed to be reading the volume whose introduction I have just quoted until the beginning of his fourteenth year. Sexual initiation takes place within the family. We see a dad, mom, their two children (an eleven-year-old son, nine-year-old daughter) and a pregnant relative—always used for display purposes. In the course of some “cheerful conversations,” the parents answer the questions of the little ones—both more prepubescent than should be allowed, and who seriously risk setting 12-to-13-year-old readers’ teeth on edge as they are forced to endure the inane company of these snotnosed little brats made to measure.

And their horrible family: dad’s an engineer, mom works as a data processor, the daughter, Sylvie, goes to school and the son, Jean,
is a fully developed high school student and happy about it…
 {
8
}

Since Jean is a model child, with a model sister, model parents, a model home, a model mini-willy, model problems and a model relative, Juliette’s the one who’s oven-bunned.

The illustrations include 33 scientific drawings of small or medium format and 62 photographs, 94 pages in all. Here’s the list.

DRAWINGS

I won’t give details; they concern biology, anatomy, human physiology. In regard to good morals, I notice 1 penis in erection (cross-sectioned lengthwise) and 5 drawings devoted to contraception. No depiction of a vulva, even a schematic one.

PHOTOS

Depiction of Naked Bodies

We’re dealing with a nudist family, so in the group photos there are lots of bodies. But these family nudes are nearly devoid of everything that characterizes nudity: you don’t even see a pair of buttocks. I’ve listed those images under the heading “family” below.

Depiction of Sex

Images dedicated to “external genital organs”:

—children: penises, 2 (one of which is in erection; this is the illustration that appears at the beginnings of my chapters, and it’s also the smallest illustration in the whole book); vulva, 1.

—adults: none.

Erotic Activity

Images dedicated to any practice of pleasure: none. I have searched in vain for a trace of pleasure on the face of the individuals representing intercourse according to the canon in the work, and which I show here. What filthy things you have to do to have a kid… the couple seems to be saying. (These photos are classified further on.)

Reproduction

Biology: 4.

Parental couple: 4.

Intercourse for the purposes of procreation: 1 (previous page). Pregnant women: 1 (with husband. Many other images in which she is not the main subject.)

Labor: 4.

Babies: 13.

Contraception: 1 (condom).

Social Life of the Child

The Family: 24. This abundance merits some detail; the large format of these photos, especially, calls for consideration:

—parents and children, 5 (4 of which are virtuous-looking “nudist” shots);

—brother-sister or cousin-cousin, 5 (one of which is a nude appearing on the cover);

—mother-daughter couple, 4 (naked without breasts, buttocks nor cunt);

—mother-son couple, 2 (dressed);

—father-daughter couple, 1 (dressed);

—twin-sister couple, 2;

—appearing as individual, 5 (idealized faces, full page. Girls, 4; boy, 1).

The outside world: 7. Interesting summing up of the extra-familial world: adults at work 2, children at leisure 2 (judo 1), environment 1 (high-rise building), third world 1 (starving children UNICEF style), sex life 1 (exhibitionist (
sic
) in a public garden).

As in volume 1 of the
Encyclopedia
, the accent is on the couple as breeders and the arrival of the baby in the family nest. But the insistence on family, source of harmony, protection and pleasure, is a lot greater. Here as there, no pictured reference to the eroticism of the child or the adult. The family-centric material (family, babies, parental couple, pregnant woman, labor) represents 50% of the illustrations.

The more null the informative role of the photographs, the larger they are. In full or double page, they essentially serve as counterbalances to the “subversive” effect of the disclosures to which, like it or not, a handbook of sex education is obliged. The authors have overexploited a well-known constant of the prepubescent mind: its interest in others and its exuberant affectivity
(we all need affection and tenderness, says Mom, pulling her big sulking boy against her).
That need for affection is what the photography excites, entices, gropes in corners and diverts to the proper place; it repeats to the young and frustrated that the family equals pleasure, that a mom is sweet, a dad strong, babies marvelous, childbirth a pleasure, modern life paradise, castration love, and that it does you good, does you good—have some more, it’s homemade.

And whenever, for example, you are reading basic information about contraceptives, a baby’s face, all of a sudden, appears in close-up—then, on page after page, come others, always larger, more touching, their eyes more animated, their cheeks rounder, adorable babies who tirelessly implore: please,
make me!

Whoever’s heart is not too hard and who compares these delightful little faces to the ghastly shot of the rubber that precedes them immediately understands which side happiness is on. Of course, preadolescents are more curious about the rubber than about babies: but they lose nothing by waiting, and their sisters are backing them up on that. Get that into your thick skull, it’ll serve you well one day.

Besides, these behaviors are right in line with other propaganda—be it sexual or not—that the child has to endure. Television would be enough for it, on which those commercial breaks with a happy-family-eating-cauliflower-à-la-turd have, without any doubt, a greater power of indoctrination than sentimental songs and kisses about love-always.

Our family is on vacation here. In the morning,
Jean and Sylvie, with sand in their hair, salt at the corner of their lips, gulp down their café au lait in big swigs, like kittens who are about to be weaned. Their parents watch them, a little jealous of such appetite…
You’ve got to be a born mother through and through to write such phrases; and you wonder whether it’s a question of someone touting a rising birthrate or a vapid incitement to pedophilia.
Living souls, you will see how alike they are
(Samuel Beckett).

The book is a kind of photo-roman, and the cliches that pepper its sentences are nothing next to those that illustrate them. These incredible, enormous photos, more doctored and more indecent than the covers of women’s magazines, reveal to us the ways of a wholesome young-executive family that is “photogenic” to a nauseating degree. A socio-economic ideal through which the doctors sing their hymn to reproduction.

“
The reproduction of what?
” asks Sylvie.

“
Of the species, darling!
”

Dad is tall, muscular, dynamic, circumcised (it’s cleaner); Mom is blond, thin and pretty; both of them are about as likeable and exciting as surgical instruments. Function demands it.

Beautiful children with long hair (they’re “free”) and simpleton eyes (they’re “well-behaved”); Juliette languorously plump with her “little future being” (
You love him, even without knowing him?
asks Jean. “
I
want him, understand,
” answers Juliette,
blushing a bit
)
,
large garden, lawn, flowers, shrubs, hammock. You see everyone naked: when they are fashionable enough to be presentable, the family of today aren’t afraid of their bodies. Anyway, seeing what’s left of them, they would have no reason to be. The little boy? He’s atrophied down there, and, in any case, the book coldly affirms for us that at his age you only get hard when you’re sleeping. Mom hides her lovely pussy and her lovely tits behind her flat and barely slit little girl. As for dad, for a long time his paternal appendages reduced by conjugal duty haven’t come to life for more than one night a week.

They shower, they touch (decently), they go swimming, run madly through the meadows, barefoot and hand in hand—an essential ritual when you have a second house and a good camera to immortalize such crazy happiness, such a “spontaneous snapshot,” which is staged before being canned. And then they talk about love, since they can’t make it: biology, sexuality, chromosomes, contraception, Freud, childbirth, you name it, and it happens, as long as every moment they can repeat babies, babies, babies… They say the word “jerk off” one time (
but I prefer
, says Dad,
using the accurate term: masturbate
) and even a pervert comes into the discussion (
Jean nods: “I saw one in the park!”
)
.
A necessary audacity: because, in this ocean of well-being, you have to ward off the anxieties inspired by the other world—the one outside the book, outside the bell jar
of
designer families, the unclean worldinhabited by the non-beautiful, the non-beautiful world where the non-rich live, the non-happy, the non-designer, the non-eunuchs, all the sick people.

It’s interesting to compare this family to the large, no-frills traditional family from the preceding volume. With them, no one was a nudist; as often happens, the small children went nude on the beach, but their parents didn’t imitate them. There was a large group of characters: eight people divided into four age brackets (grandparents, parents, teenagers, children), each forming an asexual couple (except for the parents). The beneficial effects of the parents were simple and concrete: caresses for the skin, food for the stomach, warmth and protection. This, moreover, created a meager image of the child and his needs: a little animal obsessed with organic and nutritive subjects, with a not very hard to please affectivity and an eroticism that was nonlocalized or null and satisfied by a bloated style of mothering; a stupid, selfish, prolonged baby, a douchebag that you fondle and force feed—a subhuman who can barely move and speak.