Good Sex Illustrated (15 page)

At the same time, the doctors know that among their readers, the organ-vestige has developed quite detached from the body, ready for investment, and that it wants to function; but that it can’t, and that pubescent children (12–14) are coming up against a more general prohibition than masturbation. And this, the text is also aware, is being provoked by “sexual destitution.” Then how can you distract a child from sexuality, when he’s beginning to experience desire as a lack?

Easy enough: you have to tell him, with all the authority of the power of medicine, that “sexual destitution” is an illusion, a disease. A well-balanced child doesn’t suffer from it. The muddled theoretical verbiage put in the mouth of the father when he explains why the “big guy from eighth grade” is singing the praises of “pleasure for one” implies that this big guy is unhappy because his parents aren’t supervising his neutering.

That’s why he’s aware of his “sexual destitution” and speaks so highly of masturbation—“merely to protest” this destitution. Protest! Isn’t that proof that he’s sick? What is this ridiculous demand, this absurd claim? Is he supposed to have a “sex life,” then? Doesn’t he know that he’d be incapable of managing it properly? Hasn’t he read (vol. 7–9 years) that, at
around 18 or 20, adolescents have attained their adult size
—in other words, that even they, who look like adults, are still actually
adolescents
, sexless subhumans? And this thirteen- or fourteen-year-old squirt would like to “put his penis into the vagina of a young girl?” An “anxious” child who went so far as to not even write on the door of his “locker” that he’d like “to have a baby?”

The profound cruelty of medical reasoning is obvious. It tells people who have no freedom to make love that making love is a lot better than masturbating. I have a feeling that they already suspected it. If they had the right to fuck, they wouldn’t be reduced by it to the “pleasure” of the “unhappy” children—and all the frustrated people in the world. Prohibiting the only pleasure possible and infusing it with guilt on behalf of what it replaces and is forbidden: such is the revolting practice, the appalling cheat that sex education just invented.

If masturbating until 18 or 20 really does risk putting the sexual appetites of the frustrated off course, I wonder what the complete abstinence advocated by the book will do. Or rather, I know: psychosexual disabilities, panic, impotence, increasingly paralyzed censorship, terror about the body, fear of relating to others, fear of pleasure, fear of “loss,” a fanatical desire for jealous, uncompromising private ownership of the sexual object you finally obtain. But all of that is good, even very good: because this is the soil in which the sexual Order takes root.

The child who jerks off is
troubled,
he
becomes anxious,
he
feeb abandoned
, loses all interest
in work
and
withdraws more and more.
Translation: the only kind of masturbation among all the childhood and pre-adolescent pleasures “for one” that can cause such a state is a compensatory and guilt-ridden jerking off, a divided, disgusted and ashamed relationship to oneself, the kind of pleasure that submits to all the puritanical restrictions of good sex. This isn’t pleasure, but a repressive war between the subject and his organs. Pushed by frustration, he reinforces and internalizes the laws that provoke it. His masturbatory fantasies will portray stereotypes of gratification, a clichéd eroticism, trivial and conformist scenes of pleasure: representational material gleaned from commonplacespromoted by social views of “pleasure.” This isn’t so much a type of vice as self-bludgeoning indoctrination.

Brief fantasies, embodied by simplistic images of a desire that would quickly outflank received stereotypes if allowed to express itself at that age. It takes many years of masturbation to establish such a “culture” in someone’s head, many years of sexual isolation, persistent fear and shame. There will come a time when you will know while having sex how to resist the filthy fancies of certain partners, how to police the bed, control your actions in an orderly way, rectify rituals and rules. On the other hand, even if your desire is clichéd during childhood and adolescence, the cliches are weak and vague, a pure substitute for something that is inapproachable and unknown in its concrete form: as soon discovered as revised.

Through the impossibility of all sexual experience, the preadolescent explores all social experience: he’s not wanted anywhere, he exists no more in the eyes of adults than children do in his eyes. No need to list the social virtues of this well-tiered pyramid of contempt.

Being shut up within the family weighs on him. Schoolwork— promotion leading in theory to the status of well-paid producer, purchaser of pleasures forbidden to children—loses all meaning: his reason for being suddenly seems too distant, too unpredictable, compared to the very present and urgent needs that the frustrated person feels and that he now knows how to name.

Does he
feel abandoned
? He sees that the vampirism of school and family, that blood-sucking that he endures day after day, has no compensation (as there is for adult work), that it’s a fool’s bargain, an exploitation of his body in exchange for which he receives only small, inane, virtuous trinkets. He
withdraws more and more
because he’s withdrawing from these deals and there’s no way ofliving from others. Except in crime, which he hesitates to do. The giving-to-get machine that has been constructed on his sex, this libidinal cash register can’t function for lack of customers in the shop: the door is locked, the key in Dad’s pocket. The merchandising protocol to which he has already become resigned as a means to the appeasement of his desires is unworkable. And he can resort neither to that nor to something else. He’s stuck. Does he really have good reason to feel “unhappy” and “troubled”? Why is he being deprived for so long of the pleasure of obeying? He can uphold his end of all the good contracts about which he’s been taught, that’s what he wants to do. So?

A lot of boys begin to experience this paradoxical situation (revolting out of a need for sexual orthodoxy) around the age of 13 or 14; but it takes shape much earlier, and gradually, the descent occurs step by step—and you almost never come back up. In depicting it the way we have seen, the
Encyclopedia
intends to suggest to its readers that it’s their fault if they are subjected to it: the solution is to surrender to your family, school, to submit, to wait. Too bad for those who can no longer bear complying without any result, and who want to exert the full effect of their exasperated conformities on some object. Because having a “complete” body and a standardized desire won’t be enough to find acceptance on the sexual market; you must also be worth something on the work market; be economically able to govern, preserve, manage objects of desire. A minor can’t be an owner and thus doesn’t have what’s needed to have sex.

Those whose “sexual destitution” interferes with their blindly optimistic slavery, those who are malcontent jerk-offs who envy the middle class person and his middle classes, instead of being “fully developed high school students,” inspire no compassion and haveno excuse. There are no doubts about their morals but there are suspicions about these breaking down without some good prisons to protect them: marriage, children, work, home—and they won’t have a right to these until much later. While waiting, then, they must content themselves with those in which they are.

But they are making them unhappy? An unjustifiable feeling, which prepares them for worse misfortune; and just round the bend psychiatry is waiting—for the first appearance of an idiosyncrasy: open fly, lack of discipline, “academic maladjustment,” circles too dark under the eyes, subversive ideas, sullen participation in family life, not to mention the big crimes: fornication, attempts at suicide, delinquency and perversion.

After having spit in the face of the frustrated and not very submissive, our doctors have one more duty to fulfill: warning other children about bad associations.

Because shackled as the child is, there are still two things that can jeopardize his complete castration: contact with poorly neutered associates at school and with strangers in the street.

“Perverted” high schoolers are rarely content with modestly writing:
Hurray for pleasure for one.
They’d rather make sure that it’s no longer for one at all. Even if it is “hard to love someone else,” the age at which loving is prohibited is the one when you share your pleasures more readily than you do later on.

Except with those kids who are ultracensored, of course. They’re already saving themselves up: when you have a good-looking face, nice clothes, a middle class family, a big apartment, you know you’re worth a lot and you don’t associate with inferiors whose bodies happen to be freer, and who deprivatize that much more willingly since they have nothing to “lose.” Conversion of every young member of the middle class into an aggressive,cowardly self-infatuated little big-person, who is impatient to consume, buy, show his power, protects him quite effectively from the “vice” that would compromise the respectable facade that little boys and girls want to affect, and would represent a sacrilegious squandering for people already concerned with savings and profit. If children “mature” earlier than they used to (without taking into account physical precocity), it’s simply because they quickly start copying the putrid pretense, greediness, spirit of servility, hateful aloofness of the typical French status-seeker. Verifying whether there are any secret relapses from this imitation of adult degradation would be the province of a kind of ethnology that doesn’t exist.

In any case, the authors of the
Encyclopedia
who (like all educators) are busy piling up the safeguards around the minor seem to believe that such secret erotism always exists; their dissuading arguments aim for two opposing, complementary poles. On the one hand, make tomorrow’s victims of exploitation submit to the order and believe they have a stake in it. On the other, properly disconcert the spirit of children who really do have a stake in respecting this order: for they are the sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie who will receive the Heritage. The preservation of the family depends upon obedience to the economic schemas of marketable sexuality: and the family must be perpetuated because it alone maintains both the servitude of the greatest number and the power of the elite. I’d like to see the day when a few perverted kids go around teaching that you can have an orgasm without a contract, suddenly unhinging the brains of the heirs and their future flock.

What’s surprising about education’s rabid opposition to the erotism of minors is that the latter itself doesn’t interfere withanything, and that far from being at odds with the sexual order, it embodies several parodic but faithful applications of it. Such amusements have never changed the path of many people—just think how they thrived during a time when children weren’t “informed,” and keep in mind that they certainly didn’t alter our contemporaries’ charmingly harsh morals (cf. the
Simon Report
on—appropriately—the asexuality of the French).

But there’s a difference between then and now, and it’s considerable: nothing can be instilled with enough guilt any more. Censorship is weakening, prohibitions giving way, each chooses his own taboos in the name of desire itself, we no longer know to which repression to devote ourselves in order to be happy.

And this means that the minor’s pleasures—formerly lived in the face of such shame that he forgot them forever starting with the age of the contract—could henceforth be sampled without distress and would very soon trouble the adult order. Among our parents, there are a great many of the most puritanical fathers who nevertheless spent their studious adolescence jerking off like wild men, sucking cocks, fucking clever, well-made-up great-grandmothers, or letting themselves be buggered out of appetite, interest or a respect for values. I myself know a few of them among the people my age. Then they cleaned up their act, censored it, forgot it; they can never be made to admit it—unless they pose as criminals who’ve been redeemed to better condemn those who are doing the same thing they did. But generally, only their less shamed and less prudish partners remember, with amusement or even with pleasure. What begets the order, then, depends not only on whether you’ve tasted a pleasure or not, it’s that you feel so deeply guilty about it that you’ll relinquish it as soon as you move on to those that the order approves.

The old Christian morality instilled guilt admirably; the new law—obeying-equals-the-right-to-come—is at least as reliable. Betting on both horses—the pressures of the duty to make a profit and the residue of shame—will become the art of repression French-style for this fine quarter of the century. Conservative doctors observe the agonies of the old order and have discovered, they hope, the medicine that will save the life of this valuable patient with whom the middle class have entrusted them: snuff out the evil at its root and, combining the task of informing with the mission of prohibiting, dive for the throats of pleasures that were once only shameful games favorable to the order but that now risk leading to freedom itself.

What are these household or high school games that make them so indignant? First of all, you rarely write on doors, and certainly not in that kind of language. You’d rather talk, draw—and something other than ovaries. You jerk off in front of others, or in pairs, or in threes or more. And that’s not everyday, nor as a rule. You tell stories, make things up, poke around, compare, you’re curious about those who have jism, you talk about the opposite sex and get busy with our own, you have a vague desire to stick it in something, which sometimes takes shape and finds its accomplice, or star, or victim. Poor little Jean, for example, with his long pretty hair, his stupid manner, his nice medical
penis
, obstinately and
completely limp
, and his mom who tells him that from the back he looks like his sister…
Boy or girl, whats the difference?
is Sylvie’s point of view. The women in the family certainly have embarrassing opinions if a “big guy from eighth grade” in the “locker room” decides to take them at their word.