Re: Hide and Seek

And it has always puzzled me and annoyed me that adults who have have had good experiences sexually as children, with other children or with adults, punish their own children for the same behaviors. It does not make sense.

This is a VERY common phenomenon, unfortunately. When someone becomes a parent, they suddenly find themselves having power over the life of another human being. With this power they hope to mold their child into something "acceptable" to modern society and its cultural mores. According to our current cultural mores, childhood sexuality is a bad thing; children (and, to a lesser extent, teens) are NOT supposed to be sexual beings in our society. As such, even though these parents had positive sexual experiences as children and are well aware that children do indeed have a sexual component to their being, these parents will do everything in their power to steer their offspring towards socially acceptable behavior, even if they know for a fact that much of what we accept as conventional wisdom is a load of bunk and that they are punishing their children for completely normal behavior. This is coupled with the fact that the current hysteria about child sexuality, personified by the sex abuse industry, makes many parents fearful to allow their children a sense of sexual expression, for fear that their kids will end up on a sex offender registry or in juvie, not to mention taken away from the parents (this is the reason why so many people, like Pat Califa, who once supported intergenerational relationships suddenly start singing a different tune once they become parents).

With great power comes duplicitous motives for utilizing that power...that's something that Stan Lee should have said.