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NORTH COAST TIMES E A G L E , MA Y/JUNE 2002
THE VIRGINS OF SPRING
JOHN HELD JR.
BY MICHAEL McCUSKER
"Thank heaven for little girls"
-MAURICE CHEVALIER
“When I was young the mere smell of a woman would
arouse me; now it is evidently only the sweetest, the youngest,
the newest who have that power. One of these days it will be
little boys. ’’
-J. M COETZE
('Waiting For The Barbarians’)
Spring. Time for the ritual festivals of fertility— the
interminable spectacles of middleaged men of various fraternal
orders fawning over the season's virginal young princesses while
obliterating any resemblance to the age-old carnality of these
annual rites of fecundity
Humanity's biological clock does not keep the same
tempo as its intellectual designs. We are still pagan savages
underneath our surface dust of civilized society Our ancient
fertility rituals are layered in antiseptic disguises that reflect a
rigidly puritanical and sexually repressed culture (despite MTV
and the movies). Our libertine male ancestors, elders of various
tribes or clans, demanded first crack at every Spring's virgins,
and later within reach of our own era, 'noblesse oblige' gave a
local baron the right to consummate a marriage with the virgin
bride of a peasant. Old bulls in the natural world fight young
stags for amatory dominance over a plurality of females.
Old bulls in the contrived human world compete with hair
implants and sporty automobiles.
Older men have always wanted to mate with young girls,
not from nostalgia for lost youth but to consolidate aging and
vitiated genes with strong robust genes, maintaining a vigorous
heredity by minimizing the disadvantages of worn out RNA.
Although the desire for young lambs is socially degenerate,
it reflects age-old lusts and determination to survive through
greater genetic diaspora. However, for the same reason older
men strive to preserve their reproductive vitality and biological
imperative, few younger women are willing to risk impairing their
own genetic possibilities with old dogs past their prime. After
all, randy young men are strong and eminently virile and potent
bulls yet and offer the best opportunity for sturdy stock. As a
woman wrote once: "Sperm is cheap; eggs are expensive."
The sexual desire of older men and women for girls
and boys is an insensate desire, a primeval siren's call to
invigorate reproductivity However, like individual body cells,
each person's purposes and depravities are their own. Children
throughout history have been initiated early to sex, more often
as not by adults. Only recently has society prolonged sexual
abstinence, just as it has prolonged childhood itself. Laws and
social restrictions are designed to prevent promiscuous older
persons from debauching children, especially to keep predatory
males off the bodies of young girls until they grow old enough
to make their own choices of mates. Older men and women in
consequence stifle their sexual desires for the young in fear of
social disapproval and legal vengeance, and sublimate them in
other ways. But those who do not are very often explosive with
their thwarted desires and become deviant and violent in pursuit
of them. The manner in which child abuse is treated drives
predators underground and into more violent acts. The strictures
that attempt to protect children are quite likely perpetrators of
the grotesque molestation and sexual murders of children.
Pornography, promiscuity and pedophilia are results of
sexual repression (and are in turn demanded to be suppressed).
A civilization out of control breeds violence and insecurity, which
is taken out on children by neurotic bitter adults. Movies, docu
mentaries, groups of parents and others throughout the country
advocate for laws for greater protection of children. Yet abuse
flourishes underground.
There is, as an article in Time magazine alluded to a
few years ago, a “preoccupation with child abuse. In an age
when lurid lyrics, sniggering sitcoms and trash-talking stars work
hard to rob children of innocence, the sexually abusive parent,
guardian or family friend is not only a predator in his own right
but also a stand-in for all the gaudy malevolence of pop culture
The public reacts with wide eyes and a bit of drool at the
corner of the mouth." The public gets to be puritanical and
voyeuristic at the same time, the article said — the attitude is
basically, “This food is terrible, and there's not enough of it."
James R. Kincaid, author of Child Loving: The Erotic
Child & Victorian Culture, wrote in a N.Y. Times OpEd piece:
"The story our culture feels it deserves would allow us to
speak endlessly about child sexuality and the sexual attraction
of children (for others) while maintaining our distance from
these lurid tales...the moving story of how parents affirm the
unspeakableness of sexual interest in children by speaking
of it frequently..."
For thousands of years it was acceptable for adults to
have sexual relations with children, with a few exceptions such
as Native American cultures which regarded child sexual abuse
as a capital crime. Children have since antiquity been raised for
sex, as slaves for purposes of prepubescent prostitution or more
insidiously for personal sexualities such as incest. Only recently
has intensifying concern (and a collective sense 6f shame)
about child sexual seduction initiated a campaign to prevent
and punish it, and in particular to warn and protect children.
The law attempts to protect children essentially because
they don’t have the intellectual maturity to differentiate between
what “feels good” and “what is good." These laws are specific:
It is against the law for any adult to engage in any form of sexual
activity with a child under any circumstances, even if the child
initially tried to attract the adult or assented to sex with an adult.
One woman expressed eloquently the public's enflamed
anger at the surge of child molestation. "If anyone messed with
my daughters," she said, "I would nail his penis to a stump in the
middle of the woods, set the stump afire, hand him a rusty axe
and walk away."
Child molesters do not sexually abuse children
because they are depraved but because of opportunity.
Prison does not change pederasts’ attraction for children
and eventually they get out of jail. In a number of states child
molesters who have served their sentences are being kept
behind bars, which is unconstitutional and which many believe
addresses a flaw in the legal system through the back door.
Convicted child abusers are also targeted with emblems that
identify them as molesters once released from prison in the
manner early American colonial puritans publicly marked sexual
deviants. Yet the problem remains: what should be done with
pedophiles who will commit such acts again and again?
Given the choice of pardoning a child molester, the public
would most likely set the serial murderer Barrabas free.
Following a long period of neglect, public antipathy
toward child abuse, whether sexual or violent (or both) has
swung to the extreme, making almost any adult contact with
children suspect, which only severs connections between
generations that are perhaps the most necessary links for
human continuity other than reproduction. Hitler’s policy of
turning children against their parents was never as successful
alienating generations as the potential suspicion between
young and old is apt to be in regard to pedastry.
We seem obsessed with denying our children exposure
to things they most want to know, and will eventually know on
their own. We disregard our own youthful impatience to learn
and grow up and inflict identical deceits we endured upon our
children. We wish to shield them from unpleasant realities and
attempt to forcibly repress their sexuality — yet we expect them
to somehow cope
A recent book criticizes the fearful over-protection of
children from sexual knowledge and experience, faulting the
anti-sex Puritanism of our culture, and defends adult/child sex
as indispensable to sexual awakening. Reaction to the book
has obviously been shrill, bordering on revulsion and hysteria
— the reflexive response is to ban the book. But it is meant to
be controversial.There is no debate (and no democracy) without
controversy. As Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes
said, the cornerstone of the First Amendment is the free and
unfettered assertion of thoughts and beliefs, even “expressions
of opinion that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death."
The mass molestation of boys (and a few girls) by
Catholic priests has intensified the controversy over adult/child
sex, but it has also raised the unholy specter of homophobia as
a response, which distorts the real problem of adults exploiting
their authority to coerce children into fornication that is equiva
lent to rape.
A universal dilemma is that the intense and dynamic
sexual magnetism of young males and females to draw them
toward each other for propagation, radiates so strongly that it
pulls in many more than just a few old fools unable to resist
the lure That seductive charisma is a reason we personally
and culturally not only worship youth (and baldly exploit it)
once past its manic angst, but define the rest of our lives by
the short period we are young.
We are middleaged and old nearly twice as long as
being young (average life expectancy is 3.5 score+). Youth
really has only a single purpose: to grow, mate and propagate.
The rest of life is tending succeeding generations and attempt
ing to prepare a better world for them than we currently live in,
an essential goal (and hope) of every generation.
Children have much more to worry about than more
recent generations of their elders: perhaps an instinctive
premonition that the species might have little time left on the
planet is leading to much younger sexual contact (reminiscent
of the greater part of our history when the average person
seldom lived past 30 or 40), or it might be a desperate measure
to circumvent AIDs, which fatally attacks at the very organs
of procreation. The virtually uncontaminated bodies of children
who are barely mature might be subliminally designated to
carry and preserve the seed of the species. This might also be
a partial explanation for the rise of child molestation by adults.
So we sanitize our public sexual ceremonies in the
same manner we act unconscious of the implications of
dressing little girls to resemble women (and dress older women
as prepubescents). Catalogues for children's apparel display
girls seductively modeling sexy dresses, blouses and tight pants,
as well as nightwear, which are designed and marketed by
adults. We are however a contradictory species: at the same
instant we arouse the ancient lust for young girls (and/or boys)
we act aggressively against child molestation. We ruthlessly
strip the ancient fertility festivals of overt carnality while older
men pantomime with much flair and flim-flam the covert
seduction of ceremonial queens selected from among virgin
princesses to rule imaginary courts of Spring, Scandinavia,
Roses or Regatta
Only fools and hypocrites deny the attractions of
the beautiful young. Young women and men are among the
grandest creatures on earth We all love youth, reproductively,
restoratively and retrospectly. The distinctions between abusive
touching of our young and caresses that reflect love and respect
are necessary for all of us to know. Dreams and attractions are
out of our control. Our responses to them are not.
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