Good Sex Illustrated (10 page)

You listen to your friends at school who often will say anything at all!
says Dad. You certainly won’t risk being swallowed up by the bad habits of desire after having listened to him. Doesn’t he add that he’s describing that act
so that the birth of a child stops being the great mystery for you?
He certainly can disclose the “pleasure” of “uniting intimately” since there’s a baby brewing. Also, when the narrative boldly adds that, after having made love, Dad and Mom
sometimes have a renewed desire for each other and make love several times,
the children immediately disregard that trifling detail and ask the real question that is on their mind:

“And when can a sperm come together with the ovum?” inquired Sylvie.

And how to prevent them from coming together, at the right time? When it comes to contraception, the book displays a rare aptitude: the usual procedures have barely been enumerated and the pill mentioned when the child, remote-controlled by our authors, has a new worry:

“The pill, does the pope have something against it?”

“Some religions forbid indulging in sexual pleasure if you don’t want to have children. The pleasure itself is often considered to be a sin… The pope has come out against using the pill.”

“So do women obey him?”

“Some women respect that ban.”

Oh, “some women,” who don’t obey (how low) but who respect (how worthy), humanity admires you! And here is plainly all that this work has in store for the moral—and political—issue continually posed among us by contraception. It’s quick and well done. Theshow of “objectivity” lets the authors avoid giving their own opinion; they’re content with reporting the pope’s, but none other; and the position of respectful women, but none other. And there you have it.

It’s strange that this passage—each word of which has been carefully weighed—borrows the prohibition against fucking when it isn’t to cause pregnancy from “some religions.” What other religion except Christianity, in fact—our own religion, the one that manufactures our morals, our science, our doctors—has advocated that prohibition, and still does? It hasn’t dared to do this openly for ages, moreover, and is satisfied with condemning the effective means of contraception while approving of others—which comes down to encouraging secret innovation, jerking off, coitus interruptus, rubbers, adultery, coming to an understanding with the confessor and knitting needles. But by attributing to religious morality an attitude that’s more repressive than is true, conservative doctors paint themselves up a good fall guy and give themselves a great air of freedom and reason, since—height of tolerance—they say that a married couple has the right to have sex without producing children—especially if they have some already.

The paragraphs on contraception, posed in such a way (and I’ve told how they are cleverly paralleled by pretty full-page photos of babies) certainly weren’t difficult to draft. All the more so since contraceptives are useless to children and access to them impossible for minors, including those who reach the age of needing them (a small detail that the book, in its elation over modern “freedoms,” obviously doesn’t mention). All that remained was a contradiction between the pro-birth perspective of the work and that daring information whose absence would have caused a scandal. The problem is poorly resolved: contraceptives, we’re allowed to understand, are intended for families that are becoming too large. Thissmall breach in the inevitability of biology will therefore not represent an opportunity for an escape from the conjugal setting: it will work to give a little breathing space to the prisoners found there, who mustn’t leave under any pretext. More worthwhile, Jean realizes himself, to have
six
children you can feed rather than
twelve
weighing you down. This magnanimous opinion gives the “France of one hundred million French” a fair opportunity to go into labor soon.

There’s a joke that Grandmother will tell you, too,
the mom says all of a sudden to her little girl. She wants to talk about the results of the Ogino, or Rhythm, Method tolerated by the pope because it fails—a “contraceptive” procedure that has probably led to the birth of half of our parents and ourselves. This will be the theme of a delightful joke, as if this disgrace, which is responsible everywhere it’s used for so many unwanted children, ruined couples, savage abortions, were a joyous prank by the Church on Christians, who are delighted by papal humor:

“They’re surprise-babies!”guffaws Sylvie.

Thank God that there is at least a respectable tragedy, a terrible one; Dad describes
it in a more serious voice: there are couples who passionately want to have a child, and who can’t.

“They can’t?” repeats Jean, dumbfounded.

This time no one “guffaws”; the problem is too “serious”—even if there is a frequent and well-tolerated solution, adoption. And it doesn’t get rid of the misfortune of not being the “natural” owner of a piece of flesh that has come out of your own womb, a property and yield that has been depicted to men and women as the greatest of necessities and the best emergency exit, in view of the setbacks of married life and individual failures. Stubbornly, women repeat that their marriage is a catastrophe and that their private orsocial life is pitiful; stubbornly, doctors, moralists and hack journalists retort: have a child, its the remedy for everything. You can guess, as well, what family life will be for these child-remedies, these life preservers clung to by so many swindled women, selfish people, specters, slaves and imbeciles—as if the only way to finally know L’AMOUR!, without concession, were to manufacture your lover yourself. In any case, whoever is deprived of such a course will truly be able to feel disabled, frustrated, victim of an unfair fate. Looked at this way, adopting a child won’t be enough to achieve a good capitalist, family-centric recompense: doesn’t medicine say over and over that motherhood is indispensable to the full development of a woman? Lay an egg, unattractive girls, and you’ll finally become desirable, sweet, pretty, happy, protected and respected. The other side of that propaganda, I’m afraid, is that there are sterile women and barren couples. In this case, doctors can no longer do anything but get out their handkerchiefs, wear mourning and rub onion in their eyes: hmm, isn’t Nature cruel— giving us organs for making babies that don’t work! Then what’s left of life? Living? To do what? Have pleasure? Without a baby after? That’s too hard to accept. Adopt abandoned babies? Other people’s? Who knows what hole they crawled out of, these depraved women, heredity and all that? Picking up that kind of a throwaway, taking such a risk, undergoing such humiliation? It’s mind-boggling, sure is. From the good joke about the unwanted brats to the great tragedy of being unable to have kids,
a lot of problems come up, then? Before and after birth?
remarks Sylvie, breaking into
a big sigh
—and, essentially, rendering children themselves guilty of the defects in the social order. It’s because of your love for us that you’ll suffer, dads and moms, we really owe you a lot of gratitude. Nature, a good fairy that watches over cradles,suddenly becomes a cruel stepmother, as soon as we leave the gilded world of the propagandists and touch upon a few realities of the “sex” life.

Therein lies the great absurdity of the subsequent volumes of the
Encyclopedia
, which will be compelled to tell more about the sufferings, difficulties, failures, utopian views of the sexual order, and to say less about its virtues—without casting any doubt upon it for a single moment. The family paradise in the volumes for children will be revealed to be a hell, a place of every hardship where you’re supposed to be happy anyway. Nature, Instinct and their commandments will no longer come true “easily,” but at the price of such a quantity of formulas, precautions, resignations, controls, warnings, submissions and learning, that the equilibrium of this good sexuality will seem like a cruel exercise in acrobatics at the edge of the impossible—and its miraculous happiness, a terrible ecstasy, which, on the photos of tormented victims, pacifies the faces of those who have been tortured too long. The hedonists and deviants and the perverts whose sexuality, unforeseen by biology, dismembered by medicine and persecuted by laws, remain standing alone and on every front, will be denounced with hate; whereas good, “natural” sex, taught to everyone, favored by the order, fawned upon, validated, consoled and blessed, bought for men with volleys of benefits, indulgences, reductions in taxes and obscene or virtuous gadgets to smarten it up, will be nothing but a house of cards that collapses with the least puff of air whose ruins medicine, religion and police strive in vain to prop up.

Be that as it may, the genuine usefulness of contraceptives is clearly delimited by the book: they’re for Indians who are too fertile, starving Negroes, all the poor. On one side we have our societies of abundance and their privileged families who raise anumber of children without strong material hardship and keep them on a tight leash; and on the other, the underdeveloped countries, meaning the ransacked ones, where the populations, deprived of the essentials and divested of their resources for our profit, are requested to reproduce a little less, or else this lovely system of connected vessels is in danger of having some disturbing hiccups.

Now that the problem with contraception has been wedged between the good pope and the wicked third world, we can return to serious things: the Western family, children, desire and shame. This is the agenda of the Hachette collection:
from physiology to psychology.
A strange kind of physiology, as we’ve understood. The psychology is quite something, as well.

I wonder why our authors have insisted on endowing their little heroes with so much embarrassment, guilt. They must have thought that since this guilt existed, the text needed to show it; but that’s plunging their model characters into the very attitudes that sex education is supposed to put an end to. Following are some examples, presented pell-mell:

“Below it (the penis) I’ve got something else, a sort of little sack,” says the little boy, mustering his courage…

“Oh yes, periods.” (Sylvie fidgets a little on her chair.)

“Don’t be embarrassed, darling.”

“…we really don’t dare to talk to you about it!” Sylvie stares down into her cup.

Jean gives a little cough, then says in a low voice, “Dad never explained how you make a child…” Sylvie, overcome, jumps into the water. She’s blushing like one of those fresh, sweet tomatoes from the Saturday market. “What does it mean: have sex?”

The two children raise their eyes toward Dad and Mom, whose eyelashes have fluttered imperceptibly.

“You’re brave,” says Dad...

It will take a lot of courage, certainly, for real children to follow the example of Jean and Sylvie, stick their head into the lion’s mouth, fling everything they’ve preserved about sexuality between the clutches of their parents, just so it can be mangled under the pretext of informing them. It will be the big day of admissions, a settling of scores; you will be, boys and girls, stripped bare, exhibited, hoisted onto the operating table and flayed; and as for that veil of silence that covered sexuality, they won’t be tearing it to pieces to free you, but to strip you of those secret desires that dared live outside the law. Enough of these little games, your sex doesn’t belong to you, give it back, it belongs to the Universal Order, to Medicine, to the Family.

This libidinal dismembering will have what it takes to fluster children, in fact. But if our doctors cheerfully doll up their characters with shame and uneasiness, it’s only because such attitudes “are useful in the psycho-affective maturation of the individual.” And the “counterbalance” of this “repressive system” (which, doubtlessly, the poor little things have manufactured for themselves all alone, in order to “develop freely” at a distance from horrible things having to do with sex) will consist in rehabilitating… shame itself, by turning it into the essential and attractive sentiment that makes children cute like “tomatoes from the market.”

From the market: they don’t know how right they are. The purpose of the repressions, the goal of anti-sexual instruction, is not a simple castration, an impediment to knowledge and pleasure: it’s also the re-education of the child’s desire, so that it will show a servile respect for the market codes of adult sexuality, including its hierarchies and taboos. This panicked conformity will be the sign that the “individual” has attained his famous “psycho-affective maturity.”

This is the second point that I’d like to make: the libidinal misappropriation of children by the family. The family doesn’t totally “cut off” the sexuality of its “members”; it harnesses it, orients it, makes use of it through all the mitigations, all the perversions, all the masks. It’s not through “authentic schoolwork” or in “camaraderie” that the child reinvests his inhibited desire: it’s in family relations—with, as ancillaries, a few residual, solitary, ephemeral or shameful eroticisms. The outside world—friends, school—is useful to him only as a means of trying out, within little clans that copy public order, laws of the corporeal and libidinal market, whose main instruction and practice occur among one’s own and behind locked doors.

Libidinal family-centralization, of which the work I am discussing gives some too perfect but revealing examples, is composed of two stages. First, the child as sexed subject is discredited; in the economy of the family he becomes a neuter object, nondesiring but desirable and able to be gratified with pleasures—a way of recognizing that his desire exists and that all of it must be made use of by keeping it unnamed and buried. The doctors in the
Encyclopedia
even want that elimination to be so total that the child doubts having had sex organs when he was little: after the description of these organs, Jean thinks about it, then exclaims, “We had all that when we were born?” Yes, but it was hidden from all of you because you were criminals—and to prove it, Dad tells the story of Oedipus:

“There’s a period in childhood, around the age of three, when little girls become more attached to their father, and little boys to their mother. The child begins to notice the difference between the sexes of his parents, and also begins to notice their harmony, their intimacy. He doesn’t like sleeping alone, whereas the two of them sleep in the same bed… The little boy becomes instinctively jealous of his father. He gets the impression that his father is stealing his mom from him at night!”