Suffer the Little Children: D. H. Lawrence on Child Sexuality, Puberty, and Savage Initiation Rites

Portrait of Lawrence as a young boy

 

 

D. H. Lawrence despised false notions of childhood purity and innocence, as if children were entirely ignorant of their own bodies and pleasures; "even in a child of three, rudimentary sex throws strange shadows on the wall".*

 

Having said that, he insists that the sexuality of pre-pubescent children is distinct from that of adults and that if the latter should intervene at all in the sexual behaviour of the former it is only as guarantors of this specificity. 

 

Thus, in an interesting passage in Fantasia whilst he writes in favour of allowing children to witness the passions of adult life (and animals fucking), he strongly opposes formal sex education: 

 

"It is ten times criminal to tell young children facts about sex, or to implicate them in adult relationships. A child has a strong evanescent sex consciousness. It instinctively writes impossible words on back walls. But this is not a fully conscious mental act. It is a kind of dream act - quite natural. The child's curious, shadowy, indecent sex-knowledge is quite in the course of nature. And does nobody any harm at all. Adults had far better not notice it. But if a child sees a cockerel tread a hen, or two dogs coupling, well and good. It should see these things. Only, without comment. Let nothing be exaggeratedly hidden. By instinct, let us preserve the decent privacies. But if a child occasionally sees its parent nude, taking a bath, all the better. Or even sitting in the W. C. Exaggerated secrecy is bad. But indecent exposure is also very bad. But worst of all is dragging in the mental consciousness of these shadowy dynamic realities." [125-26] 

 

For Lawrence, puberty - which he explains in pollyanalytic terms of dynamic consciousness and the biological psyche - is an absolute and crucial dividing line: before it, sex is "submerged, nascent, incipient only" [134]; after it, sex is not quite the be-all and end-all, but a hugely important factor nevertheless and "an element of sex enters into all human activity" [66]. 

 

So vital is puberty for Lawrence, that he strongly advocates that it is marked by some form of initiation, for both sexes, although his primary interest seems to be the process of turning boys into men: 

 

"Boys should be taken away from their mother and sisters [...] at adolescence. They should be given into some real manly charge. And there should be some actual initiation into sex life. Perhaps like the savages, who make the boy [...] suffer and endure terrible hardships, to make a great dynamic effect on the consciousness, a terrible dynamic sense of change in the very being. In short, a long, violent initiation, from which the lad emerges [...] cut off forever from childhood [...] [139] 

 

I don't quite know what Lawrence has in mind here, or to whom he is referring when he speaks of savages. I do know, however, that he read various anthropological accounts of initiation ceremonies, so perhaps he was thinking of those tribal peoples who practice circumcision on adolescent boys, or engage in acts of ritualised homosexuality, including semen ingestion via the fellating of elders.  

 

For the cruel truth is that in societies which do practice such rites, the transtion from the biological state of childhood into the socio-sexual status of adulthood is never completed without tears and bloodshed ...

 

 

Notes

 

* D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 138. Future page references to this work will be given directly in the post.

 

Pédophilie (with Reference to the Cases of Michel Foucault and Gabriel Matzneff)

 Suffer the little children to come unto us ...

 

Whatever some people choose to believe, children are not angels and even pre-pubescent youngsters possess an immature form of sexuality that they will often seek to playfully explore as a natural part of their development. That, we might say, is simply an established (biological and psychological) fact.  

 

The problem, however, is that this fact of child sexuality is subject to an ever-shifting socio-cultural interpretation by adults, some of whom wish to safeguard the innocence of those deemed to be incapable of giving consent and some of whom wish to share in or exploit the affections of children whom they argue are perfectly capable of expressing their feelings and know very well what they do and do not want to do.         

 

This latter position was pretty much that of everyone who located themselves on the radical wing of French politics in the 1960s and '70s, including, for example, Michel Foucault ... 

 

In 1977, having previously added his name to an open letter published by Le Monde [1] defending three individuals who had been charged over sexual activity with minors (or what is known outside of France as statutory rape), Foucault signed a petition addressed to the French parliament calling for the decriminalisation of all consensual relations between adults and minors under the age of fifteen [2]. He also later took part in a radio discussion of this topic with Guy Hocquenghem and Jean Danet [3].

 

Amongst other things, they expressed their shared concern that the penal system was not merely punishing acts deemed criminal, but in the process of constructing a new type of bogeyman - the paedophile - who was being held up as a danger to society in much the same way that the figure of the homosexual had previously been used.         

 

For Foucault, the suggestion that children - particularly over the age of twelve - were unable to consent to sexual relations (either with one another or with adults) was itself an unacceptable form of abuse, restricting their right to freedom and decision making via the use of contractual law introduced into the amorous realm. Children, he said, should be fully empowered to find pleasure in any way they liked.

 

What this argument ultimately hinges upon is whether one considers child sexuality as fundamentally different from adult sexual behavior and, as such, something that should be preserved as a form of virgin territory "with its own geography that the adult must not enter" [4] under any circumstances or for any reason. 

 

Clearly, Foucault isn't prepared to buy into this idea of children's sexuality as a specific sexuality "with its own forms, its own periods of maturation, its own highpoints, its specific drives, and its own latency periods" [5]. Nor does he think that children are a particularly vulnerable population who need protecting from adults or, indeed, from their own desires.

 

It's precisely this kind of thinking that, over forty years later, has finally landed Gabriel Matzneff in hot water ... [6]

 

Notes

 

[1] Foucault was not the only well-known French intellectual to sign this; his name was just one of over sixty attached to the letter - written by Gabriel Matzneff (see footnote 6 below) - that appeared in Le Monde on 26 January, 1977. For an English translation of the letter and a list of the signatories, click here.

 

[2] Again, it should be noted that the petition was also signed by many other prominent intellectuals, including Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, and even dear old Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. As I say in the post, pretty much everyone on the radical left at this time was pro-sexual freedom, the extension of civil rights, and the breaking of all taboos (if only to outrage the bourgeoisie). For an interesting article by John Henley writing in The Guardian (24 Feb 2001) on how the call to legalise sex with children rebounded on some of the luminaries of May '68, click here.    

 

[3] The radio discussion was produced by Roger Pillaudin and broadcast by France Culture on 4 April, 1978. A transcript was later published as La Loi de la pudeur in Recherches 37, April 1979. The first full translation in English, by Alan Sheridan, appeared under the title 'Sexual Morality and the Law' in Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, (Routledge, 1988). This was republished as 'The Danger of Child Sexuality', in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961-1984, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, (Semiotext(e), 1996).   

 

[4] and [5] Michel Foucault, 'The Danger of Child Sexuality', in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961-1984, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth and John Johnston, (Semiotext(e), 1996), p. 267.

 

[6] Gabriel Matzneff is a French writer who had long boasted of his penchant for sex with children and openly detailed his activities in his books. Despite this, he escaped criminal prosecution for many decades and enjoyed the support of the French literary establishment. However, at the end of 2019 Vanessa Springora published Le Consentement, describing her illicit relationship with Matzneff in the mid-1980s when she was fourteen and he was fifty. The book ignited a controversy in France and led to prosecutors opening a rape inquiry. Matzneff is also due to appear in court in September of this year charged with being an apologiste for paedophilia in a case brought by the Blue Angel Association.    

Denise, Denise (In Memory of My Childhood Sweetheart)

Neil Levenson wasn't the only one to have a childhood sweetheart called Denise. My primary object of affection also went by this name and although I didn't write a doo-wop song in her honour, I've never forgotten the happy days we spent together, as here, feeding the deer at Bedford's Park in the summer of '69.

Some clever people with cold hearts sneer at sentimentality and dismiss early forms of love as puppyish. They fail to appreciate what Scott Fitzgerald described as the undesirous medley of joy and innocence that belongs to immature romance and think the experiences and emotions of childhood are best grown-out of and forgotten. Almost they seem embarrassed by such feelings and infatuations and reject nostalgia as indecent or in some way reactionary and escapist.

But Freud knew the crucial nature of first love and acknowledged the psychic importance of returning to the past. Our greatest poets also possess not only a distinct memory of childhood, but retain fidelity with its promise.

Those who believe that paradise can only be re-entered via an act of socio-sexual transgression might like to consider whether such doesn't begin with Lady Chatterley and her lover, for example, but with two anonymous six-year-olds holding hands under the desk, or unashamedly agreeing to show one another their genitalia behind the bushes ...