Growing Up Sexually
The Sexual Curriculum
[to Volume II
Index]
[to Main Index
Page]
[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18]
[I] [II] [III] [IV]
Addition to
Janssen, D. F. (Oct., 2002). Growing Up
Sexually. Volume II: The Sexual Curriculum: The Manufacture and
Performance of Pre-Adult Sexualities. Interim Report. Amsterdam, The Netherlands
"Illusion is no longer
possible" (Baudrillard)
Summary:
This pos-hoc
additional chapter of project GUS explores how, as evidenced in a variety of
online, popular scientific and academic writings, emergent technologies (1) provide
shifting scenes (‘localities') of
containing erotic propaedeuses by 2) articulating with sexual curricula (that is,
"disciplining" chronologies). A rough sketch is
provided of these emerging playgrounds and surveillance thereof, followed by a
brief tour around three selected technological ramifications of erotic
propaedeusis. A bibliography
is included. [Note: I mention some of the currently
(mid-2004) available software and websites; by this I do not in any way intend
to advertise these or any products or
places].
Contents
18.1
Internet and Erotic Inauguration Management
18.2
Coming Playgrounds
18.3
New Surveillance
18.4
Three Technological Ramifications of Erotic Propaedeusis
18.5
Concluding Arguments
18.x
Cited & Other Materials
Footnotes
Expanding digital domains are known to generate problems of an
anthropological nature - among these, the
interface between two all-encompassing constructs: experience and
representation. Obviously this is the tale of yet-again redefined intimacies,
pleasures, and too-frank portrayal (e.g., Lillie, nd), ever-regurgitated anxieties (e.g., Walkerdine, 1999, 2001;
Walkerdine, Dudfield and Studdert, 1999), associated pedagogical
frustrations, resuscitated ‘politics of display' and of ‘innocence' (as in
Giroux, 1996 and 1998, respectively), a grand history of censorship (Heins, 2001), and waves of
medicolegally solidifying discourse. Adding to the pressures of conventional
media like films, TV and print (Kelley, Buckingham and Davies, 1999; Buckingham and Bragg, 2004), during the 1990s
home internet availability has expanded, redesigned and pioneered spaces of
erotic exploration and consumption, cultivating new locales, trajectories and
niches for the erotic and its propaedeusis,
or inauguration, at least for the child-with-access: new classrooms, bedrooms,
playgrounds, in short, places to hang out and make out. Chun (nd) goes so far as to argue that in
general, "sex and sexuality have emerged as the master
tropes for contact, identity, and communication in cyberspace". At one level of
analysis, the process has been stretching moral spatialities, in terms of an
internationalization and transnationalization (to some extent also a
"transdomestication") of enforcement projects and mobilization; at the domestic
level, if still meaningful, it has invoked a curriculum of retaliating
technologies that seek to formally compartimentalise the novel, now only
spuriously domestic, ambiguous, ‘cross-linked', ‘hyperspatial', in any case
dangerous playground for neophytes and mentors alike (Mullin, 1996; Lewine, 1997;
Hunter, 1999; Griffiths, 2000; Commission
on Online Child Protection, 2000; Kessler,
2002; Shade, 2002; for a general appraisal see also Montgomery, 2000). This reactionary
technologising of newly inspired and empowered erotic trajectories is dealing,
ineffectively though it is argued, with emerging and elaborating strains on
"integrity" and "accountability",
"safety" and "risk", and personal curriculum;
that is, on the whole of to be ‘protected' tastes, preferences, convictions,
and boundaries thereof. Or so the software industry enables one to summarize
the cultural status quo.
Indeed, apart from
the constitutional and civil discourse they produce in forefront technocracies,
what are these emergent technological performances saying about the process
that is thereby to be contained and disciplined – erotic inauguration? Anthropologically,
in speaking of "the learning of erotics" one might feel inclined to stress the
part of curricular interiorities/exteriorities, of "developmental"
inclusivities and exclusivities, intimacies and (why not) extimacies, perhaps amplified with biocultural assumptions of
"eroticism" inscribed (mapped, and so on) by a progressive
appropriation of desiring bodies to the proper, "adult" action radius and
thematic preoccupation (note that the exclusivity notion of ‘adult' equating
‘pornographic' is an English particularity: the formula does not emerge as
self-evidently when transposed to, say, Dutch). This archaic dual idea of the
‘erotarche' process (‘puberty' and ‘initiation') is increasingly cross-cut by a
technologisation of both aspects: on the one hand we have interventionalisms
like paediatric endocrinology, on the other we have, indeed, newly emerging
scenes of censorship curricularising
critical cultural sites of access, surveillance, and informational hierarchy.
In answering the general question: how does an apparatus that transmits anything as information, deal with the
transportation and distribution of intimacies, intended or implied or denied
(Are they reduced to their "informing" properties? Are they reduced to their
transportability?), there is one observation to make: internet undeniably
intensifies strategic stratifications of intimacies, in processes of
compensating and overcompensating securities that fail to be upheld (‘firewall'
functions), safe places to return to (‘homepages'), and moral perspectives
deemed unquestionable yet being questioned by evermore "obscene" degrees of
mobility.
On the outset it is perhaps best to recall that currently there is no
literature legitimizing any absolutist normative response as is concerned before-"adolescence" visual (or textual
or any) exposure to anything accusable of being erotogenic –in contrast to
anything "violent"– in nature (Thornburgh and Lin, 2002:p144-5, 152-5; Mitchell,
Finkelhor et al., 2003:p333-4). Many reviewers, however, call for organised
censorship on the basis of some mode of extrapolation using research on college
samples. The actual process of erotic browsing in this age grade is not well
researched either (e.g., Mitchell, Finkelhor and Wolak, 2000:p1-20 / Mitchell, Finkelhor
et al., 2003 [10-year-olds upward]; Cyberspace Research Unit, 2002:p34-5, 46 [9-year-olds
upward]; O'Connell, Price and Barrow, 2004 [8 to 11-year-olds]; cf. Livingstone, 2002:p17). The
interpretation of data here is often politically not empirically conservative;
responses to questions addressing "unwanted exposure" may well be utterly
biased in the direction of social desirability, rendering sparse any meaningful
observations on activities/passivities involved. Here we encounter the
perpetuation of recurrent folk taxonomies of intimacy practices telling the
tale of actions and passions (seduction, initiation, infatuation, obsession:
poet's stuff), but also new problems of a spatial-ontological kind known in
anthropology as "intimacies at a distance".
In the next lines I like to look briefly at some implications of newly
emerging forms of erotic inauguration (18.2)
and its management (18.3), predominantly of
importance for ethnographers of ‘online' (and generally ‘technocratic')
childhoods, and some (utterly preliminary) thoughts of a more philosophical nature
(18.4).
Eroticism-as-technology connotes two interrelated dimensions of
operationalisation: ethic and practical
legitimacy (whether-to and how-to). Technologies revolutionizing the
transmission of eros ars amatoria
style (most obviously via representation, reproduction and dissemination)
evidently impact both modes of cultural containment, and historically have been
translating these into questions of access
and consumption. The list arguably includes: language (and song), writing,
automated writing (hard print), photography, electromagnetic analogue
en/decoding, digital en/decoding. For instance, late 20th century popular print
instrumentalised a visual (and to some extent textual) revolution, because
booklets could progressively bypass incest codes by either externalizing or compensating for newly felt parental
responsibilities (taken or evaded) for illustration
of traditionally oral curriculum. The high-days of this function were observed
in the continental 1970s and 1980s, out of a culture with a long history of
pathologising so-addressed primal scenes,
now frankly portraying en face as
well as cross-section-wise genital unions in education books for the young. Among
others, an extreme and now widely disputed example is Will McBride's Zeig Mal! (Jugend Dienst Verlag
Wuppertal, 1974; Show Me!, New York:
St. Martin's Press, 1975).
In this book one encounters a primacy of the graphic, pictures only marginally being
colligated by a (loosely conversational and allegedly authentic) running
commentary. To me, the subversive nature of this work is not that of its too frank
portrayal (however violating ethnospecific visualization codes), it is that of image
superseding text as a focal mode of representation, rendering conventional understandings
of both modes obsolete. During the 1980s and 1990s one observes a now almost
complete retreat into cartooning, serving a more circumspect visualization
curriculum. As ‘text' and ‘picture', the pedagogy of intimacy appears less
intimate, more pedagogical. Technology here contributes to evermore complex
schemes of substantiating the intimate, through tensions between the formally
stated and casually imagined, between authorship and audience, private and
public recognition of literary brilliance, published and unpublished, between
text and picture, note and footnote, picture and caption, photogram and
cartoon, introduction and epilogue, file and hyperlinked file. In text, we see
a range of techniques that offer not the intimate but disciplining analysis of such: in term, chapter, glossary, index, table,
hormonal schedule, ‘questions children ask'; graphically, one sees these
techniques replayed in the form of anatomical and physiological depictions in an
endless variety of ways based on medical drawings, in vivo radiography like Computed Tomography (CT) and Magnetic
Resonance Imaging (MRI), x-ray, fluorescence microscopy, photo microscopy, electron
microscopy, ultrasonography, thermo-photography, forms of endoscopy, and so on (some
of which being used in indispensable works by Lennart Nilsson). Clearly, this
is pornography chic: ultra-realisms, so real in fact, that it becomes bearable
and preferable.
Thus, the erotic has been rendered transmittable through a range of
cultural practices other than those directly associated with sensual-motoric
modalities, active and passive, of the courtship routine itself in its
mammalian configuration (touch/sight/smell), practices that serve to verbalize,
textualise, and illustrate (‘explain', ‘clarify', ‘teach'), in various
combinations and modes of subordination, such routines proper. "Instruction" is
only one function redefined by these forms of indirection, spuriously relieving as it does systems of
intergenerational notions concerning age-, intimacy- and allosex-avoidancy
(Money, 1980), structures tailored to uphold some "positive gradient of
appropriate age" (Murdock, 1949:p318-9), or perhaps to neutralise more esoteric
"complexes" that would render problematic (from a mentor's perspective)
Occidental erotic mentorship (see chapter
14). Note that the (far from elaborated) anthropological case in question
here, variably identified as a phylogenetic or ethnopsychiatric one, has been transmuted
into a normative agenda: keeping children out of "adult" affairs.
To state the
obvious, technologies introduce novel forms of interactivity. As is the case with all kinds of informational
hierarchy, the work of the introducee here is obviously that of "browsing":
wandering through and looking at leisure. The erotic situs studiorum once was the parental shelf (typically including
hidden paternal "stacks"), and public and school libraries (often
compartimentalised in child, youth and adult sections). This site has been
superseded by a more aggressively inclusive forum: internet. This
hypothetically meets the demands of the young erotic browser even more
specifically that of the browser in general: navigatability (think theme,
genre, modality, formality), availability, storage and archiving, cost, access,
exchange, privacy, anonymity, and so on. The sheer increase in possibilities
and probabilities, of course, also puts an emphasis on the import of
technological maximisation and control, as well as surveillance.
Internet has greatly contributed to consumptivity
and representability notions of erotics. This contribution obviously
affects ontogenetic underpinnings of erotics, as well as the process and
concept of erotic ontogenesis itself. A range of Eros-sensitive possibilities
is opened by computers: video games (Kline, 1999; Walkerdine, Thomas and Studdert,
2000), including fantasy role-playing with scarcely dressed opposite sex characters
(an account of censorship was offered by Larme,
2000), assuming another life phase or age (Maczewski, 1999:p121-4; Valentine and
Holloway, 2002:p310), chatting in rooms
(Willett, 2003; Sefton-Green and Willett, 2003), being digitally groomed (Taylor, 2001 Lynch, 2002; O'Connell, 2003; Berson, 2003), new Selves to be constructed (Stern, 2000,
2002), and so forth. Cyberreality creates new subjects, new developmental
bodies (e.g., Smyres, 1999), new risk discourses (Burn and Willett, forthcoming), and so on. Thus, the differences qua growing up
sexually may not be that big after all: "Preadolescents in North America have long explored
their emerging sexuality without the supervision of adults. The Internet may be
the high-tech modern method of learning what had formerly been learned from
forbidden pictures, literary texts and whispered conversations to which adults
have never been privy" (Elliott et al., 2002). Indeed, as observed by Rebekah
Willett and associates, tweens'
[10–13y] behaviour in chatrooms closely relates to that documented for offline
playgrounds:
"One of
the most noticeable types of interaction was the performance of heterosexual
desire. […] The interactions observed in chatrooms seem to firmly grounded in
such games as ‘kiss-chase' or ‘catch-and-kiss'. When ‘chasing' a ‘boy Habbo',
the girls would squeal with delight (‘I'm with him, I am, I am I'm with him'),
they would talk about the boys' looks and they would tell the boy that they
loved him and wanted to kiss him'. […] The girls also engaged in chat with boys
which reflected the girls' desires to take risks and play with taboo topics,
namely around sexual relations" (Sefton-Green and Willett, 2003).
Thus:
"The girls in chatrooms carve out a particular way of ‘doing girl', and
more specifically doing ‘pre-adolescent girl', not only through flirtatious
behaviour but also through a way of talking, expressing their opinions and to
some extent establishing a particular power relationship with boys" (ibid.).
This constancy
might even hold true for paternalistic mobilization: "Concern about children
and the Internet is the latest in a ritual cycle of moral panics surrounding
new technologies […] founded on technological determinist accounts of media and
an essentialist view of childhood" (Quigley and Blashki, 2003; cf. Wartella and
Jennings, 2000). In any case, a cyberethnographic mapping of growing up sexually
is itself coming of age, as are preliminary theoretical ramifications ().
18.3 New
Surveillance [top] [contents]
Blunt censorship is
nowhere new a development ethnohistorically speaking: children's beds,
children's bedrooms, bathroom and dressoir
locks, book
challenges in public, school, or education libraries (),
V-chips
(Kunkel et al., 2002), media ratings (Bushman & Cantor, 2003), and finally a
range of internet related possibilities ().
What appears to be new,
however, are the increasingly apert and self-revealing ways in which
sexualities are seen to be represented as
and through protocols, programs,
programming, and control; in digi-speak: filters, cybersitting, and passwords.
First, the dramatis personae of
emergent intimacies has been marked by a shift in, if only, terminology. Using
SurfWatch, Cyber Patrol, CyberSitter, Net Nanny, Cyber Snoop, MSN content
Filter, and AOL Parental Controls, erotic development has become known as a
matter of Admins (conspiring with
review "teams", "staffs" and other backstage personnel) versus underage Users. Foucault's disciplined Child and
technologised Self are embodied within an industry offering "interception
technologies" and "filter technologies" to effectively render improbable any
degree of "inappropriate", "unsafe", "unsolicited", "unsuitable", "adult"
exposure. This is necessitated where internet is seen to represent an "aberration in the
[Occidental] family's normal power structure" (Chun, nd, p29). Transgressive "browsing" is now
simultaneously and automatically logged, blocked, and revenged by means of
automated reprimands. Efficiency is ensured using "high-efficient algorithm and
automatically online update database technology" featuring "intelligent verdict engine with independent
intellectual property", conspiring with user feedback, as the
advertisement of one program
boasts (In the case of exposed false positives, sites have to be manually
fault-tolerated. Interestingly, Cyberpatrol
by default blocks both
"Adult/Sexually Explicit" and "Sex Education").
Software
advertisements illustrate how the concept of exploration is entirely vandalised
through the concept of "review". With Kidsnet
Parental Control 2.0
"your children cannot access a
Web site unless Kidsnet has been there first and rated its content and context.
Kidsnet is a parental control system exclusively based on human reviews.
Kidsnet's content specialists have examined Web sites that represent more than
98% of the World Wide Web traffic (Neilson/Net Ratings). If your child
attempts to access a Web site Kidsnet's reviewers have not already visited and
reviewed, it is added to the queue for review" (Publisher's Description).
The detail of such
reviewing enforces an altogether suffocating containment, in which "Sex and
Nudity" figures among no less than
"23 restrictive categories
that can be disallowed (from Category 1, Alcohol/Tobacco - Advocacy
or Promotion to Category 23, Weapon promotion or sale). You may set up
individual accounts for up to 6 of your children. Your children's Internet
access is allowed only by means of a password you assign to each child" (ibid.).
The desired locus, the homeostasis, is variably phrased as "security",
"safety" and as such "enabling". Interestingly, the unholy name "Child Control 2003"
(compare "Control Kids 5.05" by
Proxymis, "Bounce Kids Web Browser 2.0"
by One Light, and others) is given to a complex piece of software that alleges
to be "enabling" children's "responsible handling" of hardware. To give one a
sense of the firepower, Anti-Porn
offers an 8-point slide to set a "web filter" (using a self-updating library)
from high to low, access-restricted uninstalling, chat filtering, ‘predatory
word' filtering (incl. custom definition), periodic
scheduled screen snapshooting, URL logging, and URL blacklisting. Other
features encountered include: search engine logging (Block Porn), keystroke
logging, program invisibility, and so on. Some anti-tampering measures are taken
to prevent whizzkids to de-install the monitoring device, or to modify registry
entries (which control program functionality). Illustratively, in a 2002
report, "73% of 15-16 year old respondents compared to 33% of 9-10 year old
respondents reported that they knew how to disable filters or controls on their
home-based computers". (If anything,
ratings systems provide interesting material for cultural-sexological domain
analysis. They document exactly what phrases are being banned and expected to
be typed in or encountered.)
18.4 Three
Technological Ramifications of Erotic Propaedeusis [top] [contents]
Internet is about redistribution and reception of information, a given obviously
necessitating a continuous reformulation of cyberethnographic methodology and
of cyberpedagogical rationale. Central question for future research is how
"(pre-)adolescent" erotic trajectories are contemporarily to be understood
as/by technologia: systems of
practical knowledge, for instance, defining nascent capacities ‘to do or make
something with a correct understanding of the principle involved' (Aristotle). An exploratory collage not
eschewing the far-reaching philosophical implications of the matter could draw
on reflections on, inter alia, (1) the Eryximachus-Pausanias
intermezzo in Plato's Symposion,
dealing with the question of Eros contained and containable in law/art; (2) possible (e.g., original Foucaultian) notions
of self-technologies; and (3) possible (e.g., original
Baudrillardian) notions of the technologically ‘preceded' body, and so forth.
Insights can then be test-cased via an application on software-aided parental
cybercontrol of children's erotic "browsing", children being embodied within an
industry offering "interception technology" and "filter technology" to
effectively render improbable any degree of "inappropriate", "unsafe",
"unsolicited", "unsuitable", "adult" technologies/sexologies. I will not be providing novel directions here, nor am I elaborating
applications, I am simply sight-seeing some of many (to me compelling) entries.
I am not advocating any particular form of interdigitation either.
(1)
From
his medical techne Eryximachus proposed to deal with the effects of love [Eros] through a proper balancing of two
parts: "In the human body […] there are two loves; and the art of medicine
shows which is the good and which is the bad love, and persuades the body to
accept the good and reject the bad, and reconciles conflicting elements and
makes them friends".
The task is to balance the effects of love by seeing that the good love creates
a temperate harmony while the wanton love is subdued (188a-b). As Robert
Cavalier
clarifies:
"The image we have
is one of Eryximachus the "scientist" trying to bring Eros under his art (or
techne). Again, this poses the whole problem of whether Eros (and eo ipso
Dionysus) can be subsumed (subdued) -- for while Pausanias attempted to subsume
Eros under law, Eryximachus now attempts to subsume Eros under science. Yet the
dramatic aspect of the dialogue has had Aristophanes hiccupping and gesturing
throughout the entire speech. These comic eruptions of the Dionysian seem to
run against this possibility of containment. Indeed, Aristophanes' sneeze
seems, in itself, the counter Eryximachus' thesis (189a)".
It seems that the
erotic/erotological browser (again, there is little evidence of children's de facto browsing agendas) finds himself
in an antitechnological context: rather than being taught the rules
differentiating indiscriminate and discriminating (Pausanias:
‘disgraceful' vs ‘honourable') passions, or
being shown the techne required
for ethical diagnosis, the ‘wanton' is brutally extirpated - with broad
margins, we have noted - as a mere possibility. Even when
‘intelligent', currently available software relies on very unsophisticated
phrase-based decisions, and the invocation of unacquainted previewing
authorities; also, this mostly applies to English-typing users. "Child Control
2003", for instance, includes a user specific "bad word list" (with some 15
presets to set the example). Filtering relies on "machine-executable
rules abstracted from human judgments", they necessarily identify a large
volume of not-inappropriate material as inappropriate, however defined
abstractly. Specific technologies
produce specific regimentations, that is, specific modes of abstraction that
lure ‘users' into prostituting themselves to a range of ‘services' that offer
to ‘enable' and ‘protect' ‘appropriate' forms and schedules of passage. This is in fact recognized by
Eryximachus, who identifies his techne
as
"[…] the knowledge of the
loves and desires of the body, and how to satisfy them or not; and the best
physician is he who is able to separate fair love from foul, or to convert one
into the other; and he who knows how to
eradicate and how to implant love, whichever is required, and can reconcile
the most hostile elements in the constitution and make them loving friends, is
a skilful practitioner"
(emphasis added).
It is clear that
software designers and utilisers in turn will identify with this task
description: auctorial preventionalism. Utopia seems to be where the browsing
party remains healthy by remaining unaware of sickness, while decent medical
training is left to post-Utopian protocols.
(2)
Technologies of the "S"elf in the light of sexual developments would
"permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a
certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct,
and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain
state" of sexual maturity (after Foucault, 1988:p18). In the context of
technological implementation, the Foucaultian agenda theoretically reads: (a) the identification
of an individual's ethical component, or substance, which s/he must develop; (b) a mode of
subjection which establishes an individual's relationship to the ethical rule
or discipline in question; (c) an ethical labour
that transforms the individual's substance; and (d) a goal of
self-care (Foucault [1990:p26-8]). Looking at technocracies, notoriously the
homes of hypertrophied ‘sexual' Selves, the problems begins with the very first
step: ethos may well ideally be enforced before it is identified or
rationalised, therefore subjection may be implicit hence uncontestable, no
transformation may be required, and goals may by essence be aligned. Another
issue might be the range of self-reductive operations thought to be inevitable
in the construction and maintenance of an online persona (see Marontate, nd), in terms of self-representation
(‘personal websites') and communication (‘emoticons'). It is here where we
encounter "a contradictory deployment of technologies and their accompanying
social intentions and discourses" (Buckingham, 2003 as cited by Burn and
Willett, forthcoming): work vs play;
education vs entertainment, information retrieval vs communication and gaming.
This obviously impacts discursive turns in both cultural history and
psychogenetic trajectories that dichotomise ‘sexualities' and ‘sexologies'
(however unfortunately restricted these terms are), a problem fully evident in
offline reality as well. Here, as at the Symposion,
we find ourselves obliged to reflect on the educability of the intimate as
foundational and enabling, more precisely, on the possible cultural-historical
restraints imposed on the inevitable interbreeding (or should we say navigation) of three constructs: erotic
transition, transgression and transmission ().
(3)
Technological curricula, par excellence, are increasingly hyperreal, in a
Baudrillardian sense: they precede trajectories, nay, render them obsolete. In
cyberspace, there seem to be no real sexualities and no real developments,
therefore, just simulations, jargon, normative schemas, experts with clinical
questionnaires, Oprah on sexual abuse, cartoon sex ed. Childhood: ‘The
territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it' (Baudrillard [1998]). A
normative rejoinder, technologically contained and produced intimacies are
Disney intimacies, nobody ought to get hurt, everybody ought to have fun. More precisely, erotic
trajectories seem to be featuring in the following unholy postmodern fate:
‘Facts
no longer have any trajectory of their own, they arise at the intersection of
the models; a single fact may even be engendered by all the models at once.
This anticipation, this precession, this short-circuit, this confusion of the
fact with its model (no more divergence of meaning, no more dialectical
polarity, no more negative electricity or implosion of poles) is what each time
allows for all the possible interpretations, even the most contradictory - all
are true, in the sense that their truth is exchangeable, in the image of the
models from which they proceed, in a generalized cycle' (ibid.).
With increasing technologization of the domestic and classroom
experience, the effects of any ‘sexual education', together with its praxis,
are being ‘inscribed in advance in the decoding and orchestration rituals of
the media, anticipated in their mode of presentation and possible consequences'
(ibid.).
Argument is that sexual developments, maldevelopments, parenthoods, and
so on, occur in a Baudrillardian hyperreality, secured by a sexual development
industry far too intimately conjoined to, for example, a ‘trauma' industry. For
instance, the American child is unabused
regardless of anything ever happening: ‘Materials you can order include
workbooks, curriculum, coloring books, videos, resource packets, a game, and
"Peace on Earth Begins at Home" sweatshirts, t-shirts and picture-frame
magnets' (Red
Flag Green Flag® Resources). No escape here: ‘No-No The Little Seal: A Story For Very Young Children That Tells About
Sexual Abuse (Marion Krupp; Random House, 1986).
Fully
evident in parent- and professional-operated bulletin boards, ‘childhood'
sexualities are among the countless What
Parents Need to Knows, endless line-ups of utterly self-evident slogans,
phrases and self-assuring (apparently) mantras. The idea offered is that it's
all quite intelligible, follows ‘stages' (that is, it's a stage, and it goes
away), is ‘important', ‘nothing to worry about', ‘normal', not bad as the
Victorians would have it, actually ‘healthy' and ‘natural' and ‘positive': please download these free factsheets, one
for every stage (‘FPQ can offer a range of services to assist professionals to
respond to childhood sexuality development'). Hundreds of chapters, guides,
courses, lectures, workshops, etc. to have the word circulate,
sink in, and erase all imaginable common sense: a large 1:1 scale map covering
a lost and forgotten desert of the commonsensical and self-evident (‘At drSpock.com, we want to help you raise all your
children to be sexually healthy adults: adults who feel good about their
bodies, make responsible decisions about their sexuality, and have satisfying
emotional, spiritual, and physical relationships with their partners'). This
map provides a vehicle for all kinds of obscure, angulated propaganda (‘This
[?] increase in the sexual behavior of children should come as no surprise. We
are after all, raising a generation of "super-sexualized" young people.
Children around the country [USA] are being exposed
to an onslaught of sexual messages that come at them with the speed of
lightening, from all directions, and on an on-going and daily basis').
Most apparent thing in the current parent-addressing lore is the perpetual
assault of reassurance against Victorian, Freudian, and other obsolete or
psychotic notions, the self-congratulatory post-nasal drip. It presupposes a
rather peculiar view of the American parent: stupid to the bone, backward some
150 or so years, and bizarrely naïve. Thank God we now have internet-based
experts to go to.
To
paraphrase Feyerabend, ‘unreasonable, nonsensical, unmethodological foreplay'
seems to turn out an ‘unavoidable precondition of clarity and of empirical
success' (Against Method, 3rd ed.,
p18). If so, there must be something to be successful in. There's something
obscene in relying on booklets and bulletin board backup in dealing with
"dilemma's" such as ‘The boy who's preoccupied with his penis'. If such is at
all anthropologically interesting it is so exactly in the ways it indeed can be
engineered, professionalized, merchandised, tabularised, staged, schematised,
and circulated as such. In fact, whatever could be ‘sexual' (read: intimate,
erotic) in ‘children', its occurrence, management, ‘prevention', curricular
containment, chronological encapsulation, occurs without it ever occurring,
being managed, being prevented, and being captivated in some temporal
stratification. It's all a simulation. Sexual development is becoming a trashy,
kitsch, mass-market product advertised by (e-)libraries of (e-)books that
imagine sexualities without the images (hence the compulsory (e-)cartooning?),
a product propagandised by a new "professionalist" niche of clinical moralists,
entirely emptied of any referentiality. North-America (infinitely best example,
it seems) is perpetually falling onto some central vacuum that once was ‘Eros'
developing. Technology lubricates the perpetual simulation of sexual
transgression and non-transgression (variably worded as ‘abstinence'); the
simulacrum then precedes any ("non-")"transgression".
Intimacies of children are contained in the technocratic idea that they
are unproblematically localisable in ‘learning', in desires protoerotic at
best: ‘natural curiosity'. The function of this idea clearly is that of
control: the assignment of human experience to the realm of ‘information' to
ensure thus-compartimentalised management thereof. There are obvious
ontological implications in this concept of erotic ‘enthusiasms' as
curiosities, now rendered "necessary" and "essential". As Fenichel (1946
[1982:p72]) observed, " "[k]nowing sexual facts" may substitute for the
observation of sexual facts and becomes a sexual aim of its own". According to
this discourse, sexuality doubles sexology, sex play equals curiosity
satisfaction, sexual development a progressively successful telling ‘facts'
from ‘fiction', image engineers imagination; paradoxically this entails a
trajectory toward embedded consensus, not of situational and personal
transcendence and non-sense. The contemporary Occidental (techno-logic,
techno-morphic, techno-sophic, techno-graphic, techno-logistic) Erotic, then,
is myth, its ‘development' mythopoesis:
it is a cultural blank surrounded by an ever more awesome and dense network
("web", one is inclined to say) of "facts", a network eventually to become
navigatable by children, prenavigated by parents (and censors and raters and indexers),
originated and substantiated by academics, and instantiated by enthusiasts of
family values. Core problem, however, is that the quintessence (evasion),
apparently, can be implicated only by the invaginating structures that are said
to be evaded and transcended: the logics of infatuation, the facts of life, the
skill of falling in love. What is sold as a culturally syntactical binary
(good, bad and confusing makes two) makes for a semantic paradox: the
production of a would-be antispatial principle articulating with the erection
of contemporaneous, rock-solid barriers. Hence, it figures, endemically
implausible technologic notions of eroticism as pedagogizable and
scholastisizable and learnable: they function at a level of propaganda and
policing the status quo, not at one of being policed and being indoctrinated.
To speak with Baudrillard on this one, the curriculum never touches the
curricularised, rather it suffocates, circumtextualizes, and ‘explains'
something that could otherwise have no curriculum at all. On the one hand the
digital environment is no exceptional one in this respect, since it has simply
proven to be the next stage in a viscose conservative moral system; on the
other, it may more conspicuously fail the operating class/stratum in terms of
dictation and monitoring effectivity.
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[added 04-2004]
[top] [contents]
An impressive case
would be Maurice Sendak's In the Night
Kitchen (Jenkinson, 1986; Heintzelman & McCarthy, 2000), dealing with a
little boy's dream-fantasy in which he helps three fat bakers get milk for
their cake batter. Objections: Nudity; "could lay the foundation for future use
of pornography". See further Pistolis, D. R. (1996) Hit List - Frequently Challenged Books for Children. Chicago: American Library
Association; Becker, B. C. & Stan, S. M. (2002) Hit List for Children 2: Frequently Challenged Books. Chicago: American Library
Association
Commission on
Online Child Protection, Report to
Congress, October 20, 2000, p14-38
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