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three pairs of lovers with space

THE BEGINNING OF SEXUAL RELATIONS
BY EDWARD BRONGERSMA

 

The Beginning of Sexual Relations” is the fifth section of “Boys and their Sexuality”, the third chapter of Loving Boys, the encyclopaedic study of Greek love by the eminent Dutch lawyer, Edward Brongersma, of which the first volume (including this) was published by Global Academic Publishers in New York in 1986.

 

The commencement of sexual activities with others cannot be considered peculiar to puberty. Where nature is allowed to take its course, things begin to happen much earlier, which is consistent with the fact that mankind has reached the highest level of evolution. Kerscher stresses “that the relationship between sexuality and procreation is already much less pronounced in the higher primates than in the lower animal species, and that mankind in this respect has attained the highest plane of development, in which the influence of the cerebral cortex becomes more powerful than that of the sex hormones. Where this happens animals are equally sexually active outside of the rutting season. When this evolution goes as far as it can go, such behaviour occurs in the young, immature individuals as well.[1] Sex play has been observed in all young mammals, but there are differences, and it is striking that the higher the development state of the species the more sexual play occurs.[2] 

Queensland. Laura boy dancer 05
Laura boy dancer, Queensland

“Among the Australian aborigines, whose society is one of the most primitive known to us (…) the physical relations between men and women are spoken of freely, without embarrassment and with obvious pleasure, even in front of children. From an early age, native children are familiar with copulation. Sex is considered a normal, natural, and most important factor in human life. There is no attempt to keep anything about it secret from young persons. The Berndts describe how children are allowed to indulge sexual desires without criticism. They may be invited by another, older brother or sister, or some other person to have sexual intercourse with an adult or a child of the same age standing nearby. Their sexual organs may be played with or their sexual potentialities discussed at length and in detail in their hearing by older persons. At an early age they learn of the sexual act by direct observation, and they imitate adult sexual activities among themselves, publicly when they are very young and somewhat more privately when they become older and more self-conscious.[3] “A kind of rudimentary sexual intercourse between children, as Bloch has remarked, occurs in many parts of the world, and is recognised by their elders as play. This is, for instance, the case among the Bawenda of the Transvaal, and among the Papuans of Kaiser-Wilhelmsland (Papua New Guinea), with the approval of the parents, although much reticence is observed. Godard noted the sexual play of the boys and girls in Cairo. In New Mexico W. A. Hammond has seen boys and girls attempting a playful sexual conjunction with the encouragement of men and women.[4] Malinowski’s famous book on the sexual life of the savages describes a similar situation among the Trobriand people (Melanesia) whom he studied in such detail.[5] On the Marquesas Islands and in India, children from about nine years of age commonly attempt intercourse.[6] 

One sees the same pattern in other primitive tribes. The African Chewa believe that their sons will never be able to beget children unless they exercise their sex organs from the start.[7] Droogers, who told of the circumcision rites in Zaïre, observed boys of five and seven publicly performing intercourse, and their behaviour showed that they were already quite experienced.[8] The Ifugao of Luzon (Philippines) have separate dormitories where unmarried individuals live from early childhood. “It is customary for each boy to sleep with a girl every night (…) Boys are urged by their fathers to begin sexual activities early, and a man may shame his son if the latter is backward in this respect.[9]

Muria boy Chendru 1960
Chendru, a Muria boy, 1960

The same kind of dormitories are used by a mountain tribe of central India, the Muria. In every village there is a separate building. Flanking the entrance to every dormitory are two gigantic wooden statues of a man and a woman, each with prominent genitals and, in the case of the male, a large erection. The little girls are sexually trained by the older boys, the little boys by the older girls. At night they all pair off to sleep together as couples so that every boy copulates every night with a girl. In some of these dormitories the boy must always bed down with the same girl (and in such villages the number of unhappy marriages and divorces is considerable), in others the boy is obliged to change his partner after, at the most, three successive nights (and in these villages marriages prove to be more harmonious and divorces are rare). Verrier Elwin, the missionary who studied this institution in great detail, was impressed by the freshness and health – mental as well as physical – of the Muria youth. The boys were strikingly cheerful, helpful, energetic, industrious, and criminality among them was much lower than among the adults upon whom strict monogamy was imposed (In this respect the situation is exactly the reverse of our civilisation, where boys have a much higher rate of criminality than adults.[10]

In virtually all those societies where children are allowed sexual freedom, nervous diseases and mental troubles are virtually unknown, or, in any case, much less common than in our sex-negative civilisation. The French social pedagogue René Schérer comments on how a system such as the Muria’s facilitates the integration of tenderness into sex and promotes a harmonious sexual life.[11]

Where their spontaneous impulses are not crippled, children in our Western civilisation are also active sexually at an early age.[12]

83 In a poor district of a large American city, one mother commented on how children there matured at a very early age. “Infants of five or six know just as much about fucking as I do. My six-year-old son has already fucked two or three children, and I am showing my four-year-old how to become a woman-chaser, too. I don’t have to pretend: what they can get they see going on every day, in every stairwell, on every floor or in every elevator around here.[13]

This has a long tradition. Ellis, in 1913, cites a writer who saw New York boys and girls of three and four “attempting a playful sexual conjunction (…) in the presence of their parents, with only a laughing rebuke.[14]

There are many reports, too, of homosexual activity beginning at an early age. “Mounting behaviour as well as presenting behaviour in human infants have been observed in both boys and girls from about two years of age, without any indication of learning (…) It has been observed that children of both sexes present themselves to males they are sexually interested in. One of the most characteristic patterns during mounting behaviour is the pelvic thrust movement (…) Unpublished observations in kindergartens and from interviews with parents seem to show that pelvic thrust movements in prepubertal boys engaging in sex play with other children are mostly accompanied by penile erection. Analysis of films of boys engaged in sex play in groups shows that penile erection mostly occurs when the boys exhibit mounting behaviour. When the boy presents himself to another boy he normally loses his erection. These observations are confirmed by reports from sexual interactions between young boys and adults (…) In most cases when the children start sex play with children around the same age, they usually require a mutual role exchange as an agreement before they are willing to accept the cross-gender role at all. This need for mutuality in the homosexual interaction has been observed in four-year-old boys (…) One factor that seems to influence the requirement of mutual roles is the age difference between the two partners. Probably in all cultures the older boys mount the younger ones, and the youngster seems to accept this passive rule pattern.[15]

Freud Sigmund 01
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

Freud was well aware of the sexual activities of babies and infants, but supposed that the sexual appetite went into hibernation, became “latent”, during the elementary school years, or from about five to twelve. He did, however, also suggest that this latency observed in the West might be culturally conditioned and thus artificial and not natural. “This conclusion is supported by various anthropological studies. Children in sexually permissive, primitive societies do not give up their sex play in late childhood.[16] It is, on the contrary, an important ingredient of their daily life.[17] As Freud said in his Untergang des Oedipuskomplexes, “It is intimidation from the outside which causes children to be sexually no longer active.[18]

84  In 1974 a Rotterdam teacher wished to give the 11- and 12-year-old boys and girls in his class an honest and open sex education lesson. I suggested that some days later he ask each of the students to write a theme on the subject so that he could correct misunderstandings and mistakes. The collection of papers is in the archives of the Brongersma Foundation. One is struck one by the frequency with which the children, especially the boys, voice their sexual desires. René (11 years): “I’d very much like to fuck a nice woman myself.” Aad ( 12 years): “If I had to write a book about it I would ask, ‘Why aren’t children of twelve years allowed to have sex while adults are?’ I think that a child of twelve should be permitted to have sex. I would like to liberate all kinds of sex in The Netherlands. There should be a declaration that sex is healthy. If they write this in the newspapers everyone will want to do it. I’d like to do it myself; it’s healthy. I myself have not yet actually fucked, but I want to. It must be a really wonderful feeling.” Leo (12 years): “I think every country should permit kids of 12 or over to have sex, because sex is normal. I’ve never done it (fucking), but I’d like to.”

Marga Reniers, who taught sex education in another school, told her students that many people find it difficult to talk about this subject. One (11 years) exclaimed in surprise: “But sex is just something human, isn’t it?”[19]

Anyone who is tempted to consider this a typically modern corruption of childhood innocence should recall that people in medieval Europe married and had intercourse at the age of eleven. The most famous of all lovers, Romeo and Juliet, were 14-year-old children.[20] In chapter one we have already noted examples of how common and socially accepted early sex was in former times.

Romeo and Juliet 035.33 bright
Romeo and Juliet in Zeffirelli's film of the name (1968), the only one ever to depict them as the adolescents they were (Juliet a little older than she was, Romeo probably a little younger)

It seems incredible that adults have such little knowledge of children’s sexuality, since they had all obviously once been children themselves. Borneman proposes a “postpubertal amnesia syndrome”: apparently pre-pubertal sexual events are systematically repressed from conscious memory during the course of adolescence.[21] More poetically, Guyotat says that a boy kills his own childhood with his first successful intercourse[22]: he kills it so thoroughly that it remains forevermore forgotten. Pat Califia, the American feminist author, was amazed to find that all speakers at one legislative hearing considered it self-evident that any confrontation with sexuality, in any form whatsoever, would horrify every child.[23] An English psychiatrist, Morris Fraser, says without further ado that “to be with an adult who has temporarily abandoned control of his emotions – either to anxiety, to alcohol, or to sexual desire – is about the most frightening experience a child can have.[24]

The Nieuwe Revu study conducted by Professor Kooy in The Netherlands in 1981 reveals a more nuanced picture. To the question, “Do children under the age of eight experience sexual feelings?” 54% of the 21- to 24-year-old men and 60% of the women in the same age group answered affirmatively. However, a substantial majority responded that it was best not to pay any attention to such feelings; only 12% of these men and 3% of the women advocated their suppression, while 10% of the men and 28% of the women felt that these feelings in the child should be stimulated.[25] In the United States there are also groups of people with open minds about child sexuality who consider it something which should be encouraged.[26] Acceptance of sexual activities between children varies greatly, however, in different countries. A Gallup survey of 1981 resulted in “tolerance notes” for European nations running from a low of 142 to a high of 470 in the following order: Ireland, Great Britain, Spain, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, France, Denmark, Netherlands.[27]

Psychologists Nobile[28] and Bernard[29] might well be correct when they say that “paedophilia” is “outdated” as a perversion: once the existence of childhood sexuality is accepted the label can no longer be applied. Of course there will always be women and men whose sexual appetite is preferentially directed toward children, but when we accept the fact that children are just as sexual as adults it is no more necessary to maintain a separate category for people who love children than it would be for people who love red-haired or left-handed partners. What is the difference between a bank director of 70 marrying a 20-year-old beauty and a man of 43 in love with a girl of 13? asks Nobile (ibid). Some people find themselves attracted by one particular variation in the range of human body types, or by a special characteristic of the human mind. When those who possess this special body type or this characteristic mentality are fully capable of experiencing lust during the course of intimacy, there is little reason to stick a special label on their relationships or on their desires.

 

Continue to Introduction to Masturbation

 

[1] Kerscher. I., Moral und Gewaltkriminalität. In: Albrecht-Désirat & Pacharzina (Eds.), Sexualität und Gewalt. Bensheim: Päd-extra, 1979, 12-13. [Author’s reference]

[2] Ford, C. S. & Beach, F. A., Formen der Sexualität. Berlin: Rowohlt, 1968, 22 & 273. [Author’s reference]

[3] Bettelheim, B., Symbolic Wounds–Puberty Rites and the Envious Male. New York: Collier, 1962, 64. [Author’s reference]

[4] Ellis, H., Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Philadelphia: David, 1913, VI, 36-37. [Author’s reference]

[5] Malinowski, B., Das Geschlechtsleben der Wilden in Nordwest-Melanesien. Leipzig: Grethlin, 1929,  [Author’s reference]

[6] Sarphatie, H. R., De seksuele ontwikkeling van het kind. In: Wolters (Ed.), Seksueel misbruik van kinderen en jonge adolescenten. Nijkerk: Intro, 1982, 42. [Author’s reference]

[7] O’Carroll, T., Paedophilia–The Radical Case. London: Peter Owen, 1980, 40. [Author’s reference]

[8] Droogers, A., De gevaarlijke reis-Jongensinitiatie bij de Wagena van Kisangani (Zaïre). Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit, 1974, 60. [Author’s reference]

[9] O’Carroll, T., Paedophilia–The Radical Case. London: Peter Owen, 1980, 40. [Author’s reference]

[10] Elwin, V., Maison des jeunes chez les Muria. Paris: Gallimard, 1959, [Author’s reference]

[11] Schérer, R., Emile perverti.  Paris: Laffont, 1974, 133. [Author’s reference]

[12] Broderick, C. B., Kind, jeugd en seksualiteit. Utrecht: Spectrum, 1971, 19. Rouweler-Wutz, L., Pedofielen, in contact of conflict met de samenleving?. Deventer: Van Loghum Slaterus, 1976, 7. [Author’s reference]

[13] Broderick, C. B., Kind, jeugd en seksualiteit. Utrecht: Spectrum, 1971, 17-18. [Author’s reference]

[14] Ellis, H., Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Philadelphia: David, 1913, Ellis, H., Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Philadelphia: David, 1913. VI 37. [Author’s reference]

[15] Langfeldt 1981, 104 [Author’s reference, but it is not clear which is meant of two works in his bibliography by Lagfeldt published in 1981].

[16] Haeberle, E. J., The Sex Atlas. New York: Seabury, 1978, 146. [Author’s reference]

[17] De Bruijn 1972, 8 [Author’s reference, but not clearly identifiable in his bibliography].

[18] quoted by Scheller 1980, 57 [Author’s reference, but not clearly identifiable in his bibliography].

[19] Reniers, M., Seks, dat hoort toch bij de mens!, Stageverslag, manuscript. [Author’s reference].

[20] Assuming that Romeo and Juliet as known through Shakespeare’s play  is meant (since it was abundantly obviously the cause of their being famous), this is a shabbily inaccurate representation of the known facts: Juliet was not yet fourteen (Act One, Scene Three), as Shakespeare says, not an unusual age for girls in Verona to marry; Romeo’s age is nowhere stated: he was a “young man” (Act Two, Scene Three), but given that all else we have to go on is the usual age of male marriage in Renaissance Italy, it is very unlikely that he was younger than his late teens. [Website footnote]

[21] Leist, W., Kinder gegen Kümmersex. Betrifft Beziehung, Jan. 1980: 8-10. [Author’s reference]

[22] Guyotat, P., Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats. Paris: Gallimard, 1967, 322 325. [Author’s reference]

[23] Califia, P., The Age of Consent: An Issue and its Effects on the Gay Movement. 12 The Advocate 303: 18-23 & 304: 16-23, 45, 1980, 20 [Author’s reference]

[24] Morris, D., The Human Zoo. New York: Dell, 1976, 51. [Author’s reference]

[25] Nieuwe Revu 7-8, 1981 [Author’s reference not identifiable in his bibliography].

[26] Martinson, F. M., Infant and Child Sexuality - Capacity and Experience. In: Cook & Wilson (Eds.), Love and Attraction. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1979, 489-491. [Author’s reference]

[27] Lacombe, F., “Sondages d’opinion”in L’Espoir 12 (1984) p. 33. [Author’s reference]

[28] Nobile, Ph., Introduction. In: Kraemer, Gordon, Lambert & Williams, The Normal and Abnormal Love of Children. Kansas City (MO): Sheed, Andrews & McMeel, 1978, X. [Author’s reference]

[29] Bernard, F., Pädophilie–Liebe mit Kindern. Lollar: Achenbach, 1979, 119. [Author’s reference]

 

 

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