In this post about Freud and polymorphous perversity in adulthood I made an offhand comment related to my feelings about why, whatever their subjective experience might be, children shouldn’t be sexualized or otherwise pushed to be sexual before, well, adulthood.

In the aside I said

I think (obviously for someone with my blog title) it’s more appropriate to encourage sexual expression in adults after we’ve gone through a lot of healthy identity formation. One of the problems with children, ironically, is that because they’re polymorphous they’re more easily manipulated down convenient-for-adult narrow pathways (gee, sound familiar?)... as opposed to organically developing their own.

I said it here.

Since the post was actually about something else I didn’t really think about it till Jha of Rebellious Jezebel Blogging called it to my attention in comments.

I like the way you put this. Somehow, whenever I try to talk about comprehensive sex education for kids, either I get the told that I’m expecting kids to have sexual expression too young, or that sex shouldn’t be a priority anyway. It’s kinda mind-boggling.

She said it here.

Yup. And by the way it’s not as easy as it looks. This is one of the reasons I take my hat off every time I think about how hard Heather Corinna works to keep things safe but neutral at Scarleteen and in her writing for young people.

It’s not just about sexual trauma in childhood, though the world overflows with adults who will never enjoy their own sexuality thanks to an adult who enjoyed it for them… for a day, or a week, or a year… before they were ready. It’s that growing up is complicated. The complex soup of sex identity, sexual preference, sexual orientation, interpersonal negotiation with peers, critical faculty development, and hormone-surge processing, body-image adjustment (compounded by, um, profound body changes), and reconciliation of gender construction messages with subjective reality takes a really long time! All that and differential physical and psychological development rates and timing for boys and girls. And physical “readiness” can precede actual emotional or developmental readiness as well.

Which is not to say that it’s not appropriate to try to influence children’s sexual development before they’re ready to be sexual on their own. With sports it’s fine to tell a child “if you’re going to play you should be familiar with the rules and wear appropriate equipment but wait till mineralization in your shoulders and knees before playing X” and with sex it’s fine to say “if you’re going to be sexual you should be familiar with the rules and wear appropriate equipment” as well. So comprehensive sex education, as designed and taught by competent authors and instructors, is just fine.

Beyond that? It will always be fiendishly hard to separate one’s own, um, interests from genuine pedagogical concern, therefore for entirely pragmatic reasons it will always be best to give young people room to let their own sexualities emerge.