“Methodologies in sexuality research must evolve to ensure more participatory and child-centered methods,” claims the American Sociological Association in one of the most disturbing articles ever, complete with calls for children to draw pictures and film their sexual experiences.
“Sexualities scholarship marginalizes childhood sexual pleasure, positioning children as vulnerable subjects. This article repositions childhood sexualities within a pleasure-centered, globally oriented, and power-aware frame informed by feminist, queer, and decolonial perspectives,” so begins the abstract for The American Sociological Association’s recent article on “Childhood Sexualities: On Pleasure and Meaning from the Margins” by Deevia Bhana and Stefan Lucke. “Drawing on Southern research from South Africa and other contexts,” they continue in authoritative tones, suggesting this is a serious piece rather than a call to sexualize children up to and including asking them to draw pictures and produce media about their experiences, “we interrogate dominant narratives of sexual innocence that suppress young people’s desires and show how children negotiate pleasure and meaning amid intersecting hierarchies of age, race, gender, and class.” In their view “Pleasure lies at the heart of sexuality,” but there hasn’t been a sufficient “focus on sexual pleasure [which] is relatively peripheral in mainstream sexuality research,” especially in children. Further, this is not “accidental,” nor could it simply be smart to let children be children, instead reflecting “the ways in which scholarship has routinely centered sexual danger and racially neutral, adult-centric, heteronormative, Global North subjects, while marginalizing the queer, childhood, and political dimensions of erotic life…Nowhere is this politics of misrecognition, erasure, and marginalization more acute than in childhood, where preadolescent children’s erotic capacities are routinely pathologized.” One might argue that the real pathology lies in thinking so much about the erotic capacity of children, but rather than preserving childhood sexual innocence, which of course isn’t something the average person has ever doubted in the modern world and for anyone who has young children or grandchildren, has never had any reason doubt, the authors are upset that “many scholars and the public alike overlook children’s everyday pleasures, striving instead to banish childhood sexuality altogether.” Instead, they proposed a new approach, “Much akin to research conducted with colonized Indigenous communities, we consider childhood sexuality to suffer the same colonizing/marginalizing actions.” In other words, the white man is keeping the sex lives of children down and preventing expert researchers like these two from studying those sexual lives.
After defining “pleasure” based on research performed by others who are hopefully less insane, they seek a framework “that can be employed across contexts” and “a broader consideration of sexual acts” that “can make studies of sexual pleasure more productive,” whatever these things actually mean in the real world are left unsaid. Somehow, however, they leap from there to the notion that sexual pleasure in children meets “these goals perfectly,” because of course they do, “as they escape narrow, adultist, and (hetero)normative ideas of what pleasure should entail, how it should be achieved, and what is deemed ‘sexual’ in the first place.” Rather than this current overly restrictive view, they propose that “children’s creativity and playfulness, with themselves or with peers, allow many ways of (also nongenital) erotic pleasure and exploration that challenge adult-centric ideas of sexuality” and “that children can have an interest in romantic relationships” through “a more affirmative, ethically attuned research agenda that includes the voices of children themselves.” While it is hard to see how exploring the erotic pleasure of children and challenging the common sense notion that eroticism is for adults can be done in an ethical manner, or at least any ethical framework that bans child pornography and pedophilia, this includes the “need to expand studies to address age, race, gender, and sexual orientation,” “disrupt dominant narratives that efface childhood sexual pleasure,” and “re-envision children’s sexuality, traditionally consigned to the margins of research, to uncover its potential for radical possibility.” Without explaining what those radical possibilities may be beyond an actual explosion in child pornography and pedophilia, they believe their proposed focus would benefit far more than the millions of kids suddenly becoming sexual creatures, diddling themselves and being diddled by others. Instead, presumably through some magical, undefined intersectional process, all of society would reap these rewards, “as a vantage point through which structures of power become visible while illustrating new possibilities for sexual meanings and their change or development over time,” once again whatever that means.
Perhaps needless to say, everything must return to the “non-heteronormative perspective,” as though same sex people raising five year old’s are hoping they get off on a regular basis, wondering how frequently they play, you show me yours. Thus, “When approaching pleasure from feminist, queer and decolonial frameworks several questions arise: Who is able to experience or hindered from experiencing pleasure? How does control and regulation of pleasurable sexuality work inside the power regimes of any society? What is the liberatory potential of using pleasure as a conceptual vehicle? And why is pleasure important in the first place?” Apparently, “Several scholars are part of a growing body of Southern scholarship that provides insight into the questions about childhood, gender, race, class, age, and sexuality.” As opposed to “Northern epistemologies whose insistence on innocence and dependency sustains racialized hierarchies of knowledge and being,” these “scholars reframe childhood sexuality from a site of peril to also a site of pleasure and positive meaning. They do so by infusing an intersectional, decolonial perspective that contests universalizing assumptions with locally rooted knowledge while also suggesting the need to include pleasure and childhood perspectives in the quest for sexual and gender justice.” Setting aside my remaining quite uncertain anyone on this Earth knows what that means or why “locally rooted” knowledge about masturbating and potentially fondling children would be superior to any other knowledge on the subject, “South Africa in particular is rethinking the field of sexuality studies toward greater inclusivity of marginalized voices where pleasure is not eroded in thinking with children and young people.” After blithely assuming without any evidence whatsoever, that it’s “clear…the notion of childhood sexual innocence is not a natural construct” and “a colonial fiction that has long erased the very thought of putting sexuality and childhood together,” they cited research that has “explored how children themselves understand sexuality as thoughtful, agentic social actors who are aware of risks but also articulate their investments in pleasure and desire.”
Incredibly, this new empirical work relies somehow on the obvious that everyone already knows and which has generally been considered merely innocent play, “children younger than ten” write “love notes,” declare “crushes,” and “transform playground chase into kiss-kiss flirtation,” but rather than viewing this as the innocent play it surely is, the same way a kid will push a fake lawnmower around the yard or make tea in a playhouse, they believe these children are really “mobiliz[ing] heterosexual scripts” and “weav[ing] bodily pleasure into the rhythms of everyday school life.” The obvious continues for a brief while after, “Pleasure is a generative force through which children practice gender, test boundaries, and make themselves intelligible to peers,” before developing into yet another harangue against normalcy itself, “where this agentic experimentation unfolds inside the heterosexual matrix, so children read their own sensations through local codes of masculinity and femininity as well as through adult expectations that trivialize their acts as innocent play or ‘puppy love.’” As usual, “Race, class, and gender” are to blame because “in materially deprived South African townships, the delights of flirtation are inseparable from the precarity of food insecurity, over-crowded housing, and endemic violence. Boys’ performances of toughness are not simple rehearsals for later heteropatriarchal dominance; they are also strategies for navigating poverty and racialized devaluation. Girls, meanwhile, negotiate pleasure through the ever-present possibility of harassment, navigating desire and fear in the same moment. Pleasure and pain are therefore entangled and tightened by structural inequality…Acknowledging children as pleasurable beings does not negate harm; rather, it clarifies how vulnerability is produced through social relations, not through children’s desires themselves. Decolonial scholarship warns that the notion of innocence recasts minors as passive objects in need of rescue,” which of course most children are given they lack the resources or reasoning ability to make adult decisions for themselves, and are generally speaking in control of their parents or local community, “Re-centering pleasure at the margins,” whatever that means once more, “therefore confronts both colonial and heteropatriarchal logics, insisting that children’s own accounts of what feels good, exciting, or frightening are legitimate sources of knowledge. Thus, letting children ‘do’ sexual pleasure in their own way is vital for their sense of their own agency. Yet, only by tracing the circuits in which race, class, gender, and age secure or foreclose pleasure can we theorize children’s sexual worlds.”
Personally, one has to wonder what sort of person would want to spend time imagining the sexual fantasies of children, but afterwards, the authors finally get to what they mean in something resembling practice: “What does it mean for sociology and sexuality studies to take seriously the idea of childhood sexual pleasure and meaning from the margins?” Sadly for us all, this is viewed yet again through the lens of whiteness, as though people of all races and creeds aren’t interested in protecting their children, and yet again it is reduced to performative intersectionality-speak that means nothing when you really think about it. “First, it means that marginalized experiences are not peripheral but central to theory-building. Centering these margins thus enriches the global understanding of sexualities by making it more empirically grounded and diverse. Second, centering pleasure in sociological debates, especially where it has been rendered invisible, is a matter of gender and sexual justice.” Perhaps needless to say, why studying children diddling each other, themselves, or potentially being diddled by adults achieves all this is left entirely unsaid. How does sexualizing a six year old enrich our understanding of anything or help gender and social justice in any way, shape or form, assuming there even are such things in the first place? Regardless, to achieve this new, promised breakthrough they proposed “that methodologies in sexuality research must evolve to ensure more participatory and child-centered methods,” again without explaining what that actually means, except that we need to hear “young people speak in their own voices, whether through interviews, drawings, digital storytelling, or other creative means is vital.” How about videos of their encounters? Is that creative enough or is that already covered under digital story telling? This, once again through some unknown means, “opens up new questions and future research directions. For instance, how might the insights from refugee or LGBTQ+ youth reimagine childhood sexualities?”
Setting aside why any sane adult would be interested in reimagining childhood sexualities in the first place, much less expecting them to create multimedia slideshows to share with adults, calling this troubling is a candidate for understatement of the century. First, this wasn’t published in a flyer for the North American Man Boy Love Association. It’s a product of what is supposed to be a sober, reputable organization, the American Sociological Association, which is proving itself anything but by wondering what pictures a child might draw if asked to describe a sexual fantasy. Second, it’s almost impossibly difficult to conclude the goal was anything except the sexualization of children given the possible benefits of such a course of research are entirely unclear, practically unsaid beyond the standard intersectional pablum. How are the goals of gender and social justice served by asking children if they masturbate, alone as a group, and having them describe their possible arousal, possibly even create a digital story out of it? To me at least, it seems overwhelming obvious that those who are pre-pubescent cannot be sexual beings by definition given they have not reached sexual maturity and though they may well play at being boyfriend and girlfriend, as they play at everything else, treating them as sexual beings in their own right has no obvious upside – and a lot of potential downside. Third, what are they saying about potentially gay, lesbian, or transgender children that they’re not innocent in the same way hetero-kids are and should somehow be expected to be more sexual? If you read between the lines, the suggestion seems to be that childhood innocence is good for the “normals,” but those who will ultimately grow into a different form of sexuality, need to be sexualized as soon as possible – and need to tell adults about it complete with pictures, so they can be studied like a biologist filming mating animals. Fourth, how is it possible that all ills in the world, even the supposed ill of not sexualizing children, ultimately come back to intersectionality and colonialism? However disgusting and downright despicable this paper truly is, the same exact paper could’ve been written on just about any topic. Only the subject changes, the need to blame anything and everything on white people remains the same, and so the experts only get more insane.
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