If stroking the staff, surfing the slit or whatever, is good for you, does it not follow that parents should inculcate in their children the importance of engaging in these behaviors from the earliest ages? Children learn by example, so wouldn’t the ideal upbringing be one in which children regularly witnessed Mommy and Daddy working the meat … together or separately as the occasion required?

We teach them to brush their teeth, eat healthful foods, play nice with their friends, fasten their seat belts and so on, and these are taught by example, so why not sex? Okay, lots of parents DON’T teach these things by example, and the results … early onset of dental caries, playground bullying, obese kids, nutritionally deprived kids, etc., support the leading-by-example point.

So back to the rhetorical question: why not sex?

It seems to me not just odd but downright perverted that our contemporary society has built an edifice in which children must NEVER, EVER be exposed to any sexual activity, to the point where (I think, anyway) such things would be considered “child sexual abuse”. The perpetrator-parents would go to prison for a long time, and the children would go to foster homes, where they would possibly be exposed to physical abuse and neglect … to say nothing of the lifelong trauma arising from being violently torn from their parents and being told, both by word and deed, that the natural, healthful things their parents demonstrated and which they had found felt really good was, according to society at large, unspeakably naughty and worthy of the deepest shame.

The fact that this is the world we live in, a world where most people have been brought up under these perverted conditions, suggests a lot to me in why things are the way they are … not just the recent spate of revelations about workplace sexual aggression (doesn’t that derive a lot of its power from the shameful nature of the aggression for the victim?), but going much further into our warlike tendencies (if you grew up with shame and guilt, what better place to release it than on “enemies”?)

I would like to see a lot more attention put on this topic, but it is itself so buried in shame and guilt that I’m not hopeful. I wrote something about it several months ago, and the result was a reply from someone saying, “So you support child sexual abuse?”

Sigh.