That’s a heck of a title, isn’t it? Don’t worry, it’s not as potentially illegal as it sounds. I just want to do a thoughtful overview of our views of child sexuality to see how it has changed and how we got to where we are today.

Before Freud, people did not have a view at all about childhood sexuality because back then, people did not think about children much at all. Much of the world didn’t even totally see them as people. They didn’t educate children, they did very little to raise them, and often children were treated as if they were petty annoyances that have to be endured, rather than innocent wonders who must be treasures.

That is, of course, exactly what you would expect from immature adults who can only view “other” children as dismal reminders of how onerous one’s adult responsibilities have become, or as rivals for all the good things in the world. And the adults were immature precisely because said adults were raised by adults like them.

The concept of the innocent child was not truly established until the 1800’s. Bucolic childhood imagery flourished, especially in the newborn field of advertising, and with the rise of urbanization came a rise in education, literacy, and what we would consider the proper upbringing of children. Children were freed from their role as farm labour and thus free to have a lengthy education and plenty of leisure time besides.

This opened up the possibility of a vision of childhood as a time of purity and innocence. Children were viewed almost as angels, and urban life created a demand for this state of purity in an increasingly filthy world.

Couple that with the attitudes towards sex of the era, and you get the birth of the sexless child. In this view, children are free from any association with the world of filthy animal rutting. Sexuality was something that just sort of happened at some point in a child’s life, and before that point, there was no such thing as childhood sexuality.

Enter Freud. Via his analysis of his patients, he concludes that not only do children have a sexuality, but that sex-related events in the child’s life could have a massive impact on the child well into adulthood.

Perhaps the idea of with the deepest impact, though, was the evils of repression. It broke the code of silence of a highly repressed world and dared to say that it is better medically to discuss these things openly and release them than it is to suppress them and let them fester.

This was a massive improvement over the hyper-rational authoritarian view of the times which held that it was your duty to behave a certain way and everything else was to be completely suppressed and never even mentioned, ever.

Thus, via Freud, the idea of the innocence of children (and the brutal and traumatic suppression it engendered) was shattered for the first time. A great emancipation of sexuality was unleashed, the first sexual revolution, and a common sense naturalism flourished where many taboo things were re-labeled as “natural” and “normal”.

Freud’s work even helped destroy the pernicious delusion that masturbation was somehow harmful to a child.

Unfortunately, that only lasted until around World War I. Both world wars, plus the Great Depression, caused a huge setback in the urbanization and educational trends that had led to both the sexless child view and the post-Freud naturalist view. Children went part-way back into the background of life, and the world became a very adult place.

Then came the Fifties and the birth of the truly modern lifestyle, and the “atomic family” view of life. The wife, the kids, the two car garage, the thoroughly modern kitchen. It was a vision of limitless middle class lifestyle and endless optimism stretching out into an ever improving future.

This came with a brand new vision of the innocence of children, the Father Knows Best version, and a more modern wave of suppression, repression, and hidden depression. People could barely acknowledge adult sexuality existed, let alone child sexuality, and so began the Long Dark that was not truly broken until the rise of therapy in the Seventies.

The final straw, though, was when child sexual abuse was dragged into the light and people were forced to accept that sometimes, sex and children do intersect in a very bad way.

And so begins the modern era. On the one hand, when the naturalist view came back into power in the Seventies, it stayed for good. The idea that children should not be punished or scolded for asking questions about sex or masturbating took permanent root and the traumas of old were, by and large, not visited upon children any more.

But the “explore and accept” culture of sexual revolution, while largely successful in bringing sexuality into the mainstream and banishing the darkness clinging to human sexuality, hit a major bump in the road when the sexual revolution looked like it might start including children.

That violated the child/sex barrier’s deepest level, and so in the rush to stop the sexual abuse of children, it slowly became increasingly taboo to even discuss children and sexuality in the same sentence.

Pedophiles of all stripes became the societal outcasts, a dumping ground for everyone’s hate, and in the process, otherwise free nations became infected with an entirely out of character paranoia about seeming like “one of them”.

That would not really matter, of course, except that once more, we are traumatizing children about sex. Not about masturbation or where babies come from, granted, but instead we are teaching them that their innocent bodies attract the most horrible, despicable, hated kind of people and they have to be constantly on guard against this in order to be safe.

Thus, we push child sexuality back into the darkness again. Maybe not all the way, but in a way that is sure to cause the poor children raised in such an atmosphere much undue suffering and confusion in the years to come.

That’s it for my recap. Tomorrow, we discuss a rational, evidence-based observational model of the true face of childhood sexuality, and how we can use this model as the blueprint of a brighter and more harmonious sexual future for all.

I will talk to all you nice people again tomorrow.