The Sexually Powerful Child

In my article on the sexual girl in art I pointed out how our culture, in creating the great taboo against even artistic depictions of the sexual child, have actually invested in children a kind of sexual power. I suggested that many artists now recognize and fear that power, such that they must examine it from a distance using distorting lenses, as a wildlife photographer might observe a tiger from far away and use a soft-focus lens to mollify that power. The distorting lenses employed by such artists run the gamut from surrealism to fantasy to comical absurdity to outright ugliness, and everything in-between. I listed several examples of artists who have utilized these modes to explore the sexual girl child.

Young children may not have an adult-level understanding of sex, but they certainly have a strong sensual connection to their environment. Indeed, since they do not master abstract thinking until nigh about age 12, nearly everything about their understanding of the world is rooted in the senses. In that sense they are almost more sexual than adults, still grounded in the sort of primal drives of our primitive ancestors, and I think this is both part of their allure and a central aspect of why they're so dreaded by culture.

As our culture continues to evolve into an ever-increasing post-modern muddle, children remain largely the same, which means the modern adult is further and further distanced from his chthonian origins, but children are very much 'first men' in the sense that Novalis referred to: ("The first Man is the first Spirit-seer; all appears to him as Spirit. What are children, but first men? The fresh gaze of the Child is richer in significance than the forecasting of the most indubitable Seer.") This isn't to say that children possess some sort of mystical power--it's easy to make that mistake, as I think Novalis did, but children have a knack for seeing things as they are, for cutting through the bullshit, and for reveling guiltlessly in their own sensuality and the circus of pleasures offered by the world around them.

So I think children are feared precisely because they are so sexual. The idea that children are asexual and/or harmed by sex isn't merely a distortion of reality; it's an outright subversion of it. Of course, we must understand the sexuality of children on its own terms, because it's much different than that of adults. But it is, in fact, less clouded by all the abstractions, add-ons and ideologies of the adult.

So this whirling storm of dread that's building cannot continue to go unnoticed by children themselves. They will not understand it for what it is, but they will have to assimilate it and react to it, and I believe we're starting to see that happening. Adults now dread intimacy with children far beyond what is reasonable. Those insecurities are being perceived by children, absorbed, processed, and children are learning to play with their sexuality, to use it as a tool on unconscious level. This is part of their built-in mechanics of survival, as children remain entirely dependent upon adults. Where before their sexuality was mostly a non-issue, they are now becoming active participants in the dialogue occurring beneath the surface, learning to actively suppress their sexuality. But that also entails a kind of low-level awareness of the power they possess.

Think of how easily a child could destroy an adult by fabricating a story about being molested. Are children aware of the power they hold over the lives of adults with regards to sex? I suspect many of them are, especially as they near adolescence. But they must recognize too what a shimmering gem their sexuality has become, how it simultaneously blinds and provokes society. We are experiencing the fallout of that on a global scale. Wow.

Now, we must be careful to distinguish this idea of sexual power from sexual empowerment, which children certainly do not have. Now the questions. What are the psychological effects on kids of this massive rift between the sexual power society has invested them with and the sexual empowerment they lack? Does this create a dissonance? What is the possible evolution of this condition? How will children growing up in this environment come to see themselves in the future? How will they view their own children?