When I was a kid, I did weird sex stuff
with other kids. And, to the extent of
my sneakily begotten and wildly inaccurate knowledge on the subject, I knew
what I was doing. When my two year old
best friend ushered me into the nook between big and little side at crèche to
show me her ‘girl doodle’, I was all too aware of the naughtiness of the
revelation. When, at 4, I plodded over
on the reg to my next door neighbour’s house for a cubbyhouse session of
‘Doctors and Nurses’, and her mother drew the curtain to find me buried
somewhere in between her lovely daughter’s thighs, I was red faced as a touring
pom. Because I had been to a doctor, and
never had I seen them engage in such behaviour with their nurse. My sister and I would play the ‘touching
tongues’ game, laughing hysterically as we separated in a spray of
spittle. At Christmas one year my boy
cousin and I were caught, butt naked and fawning over each other, in an
oh-so-steamy bath. I liked this cousin
very much at the time. And I liked it
even more when we got nakie together. I
knew, he knew, we knew as kids, that we were doing the ‘sex stuff’.
Do I have to say it? This stuff is totally normal! It’s an explorative stage of childhood,
driven in equal parts by the desire to understand our bodies, to interpret the
messages we are steadily absorbing from the adult world, and, shock(!), for
pleasure. Every single person I’ve
gotten pissed enough with to brave the subject has spilt their own sexy can of
beans, and psychologists have been telling us for decades that sexual
exploration in kids is A-OK.
So, why am I telling you this? To relieve my own burden of gnawing guilt and
come clean? Maybe a bit. But mostly, it’s an extremely cumbersome
segue into my declaration of solidarity with Lena Dunham. No matter your opinion on the Girls creator,
the ‘child molester’ accusations being hurled her way by the right wing
sleazeballs over at Truth Revolt are, as she puts it, fucking disgusting. Since the furore blew up, there have been an
opportunistic few in the corner of the publication. I’ll choose to ignore them. What’s been heartening to see is the
out-pouring of support for the artist, most prominently from the newly minted
Tumblr site Those Kind of Girls, which serves to normalise the sexy,
touchy stuff we do as kids by providing a space for others to tell spill their
stories.
This is obviously awesome. But it doesn’t go far enough. Embedded within the context of the tales, a
new problem is presented.
Almost all of the contributors admit to
‘doing stuff’ as kids, but with a loud proviso.
It wasn’t sexual! They didn’t
have a clue what they were doing! They
were just kids, after all! The implicit
message is; it’s OK if you did it, but only if you did it in an innocent, rosy-cheeked
way that conforms to our rigid standards on what a child should and shouldn’t
be. The inherent hypocrisy stems from
setting out to assuage feelings of shame derived from childhood curiosity,
while implicitly shaming those whose experience deviates from this culturally
palatable norm. Those who knew they were
being sexy. Those who enjoyed it. Me.
All this stuff hails from our
pearl-clutching tendency as a society to anchor our morals on notions of what a
child should be. We’ve constructed
anything but picture-book innocence as deviant, as perverted and weird. Because we cannot stomach what professionals have
been telling us for years, we pathologise what should be a normal part of the
transition to adulthood.
Before my many drunken chats on the
subject, I thought I was a fucking weirdo, too.
In my quieter moments I would reflect in shame on the time spent with my
neighbour behind the fitted-sheet curtain.
Every single one of my convo-buddies has admitted to feeling the same. But really, we got off lightly. The fucking tragedy derives from the adults
out there who haven’t had this cathartic opportunity, whose guilt has led to
mental illness, and for what?
I’m not bitching on the Tumblr
site. It’s doing a good thing. But if we’re gonna talk, let’s really talk. Not everyone has the luxury of drunk buddies
to tell them it’s ok.
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