Good Sex Illustrated (16 page)

What doesn’t exist, isn’t named—is it allowed or prohibited? Because the Book doesn’t talk about the anus. Can it, too, be used to
share,
to make things
double
?

Certainly seems to, tsk, tsk. It’s just like Dad-Mom. Jean notices, his conscience at peace, that
the penis in erection slips inside
him
instinctively
—ouch!—and that
the two bodies become no more than one.
They
find a movement together
—yeah, keep goin’!—
and the pleasure that both of them are feeling is so strong that the man
(sorry, the big guy from eighth grade)
has an ejaculation.
It certainly is
orgasm
, even though Jean was getting hard—which worries him: getting a hard-on standing on two feet in broad daylight is impossible, according to his book; so does
orgasm
make you sleepwalk? But wait, he feels just like he’s woken up. Strange. Let’s hope it’s not a disease, getting a hard-on deliberately and when the sun is out… In fact, everything went according to the rules, except they didn’t
feel wonderfully peaceful together
, because math class was starting.

Jean will come home feeling perplexed. The problem is that even if
the spurt
was
powerful enough
, no
sperm
would have been able
to reach the ovum.
But wouldn’t that be
how,
for example,
you can—if you want
, not to
have a baby?
It must work that way sometimes.

And this is serious: certainly this is the moment when
Dad, very moved, squeezes Mom’s hand
(as he did at the concert, when she was pregnant and Jean moved inside her belly) because—ouch!—it actually does hurt a little. The resemblance between being pregnant and being fucked in the ass is disconcerting: the same words are used to describe every kind of pleasure, that must be why. With Jean as well, earlier, someone
squeezed
him
hard, very hard
,
looked
at him,
very moved
, and someone
moved inside him for the first time
—it wasn’t a baby, moreover, ouch no. All that was missing was some Mozart. Jean scrubbed his ass pensively: is this what they call
a feeling of total fulfillment?
First of all, does a boy have the right to feel completelyfull? He’ll have to
reread the book with dad,
there are some things that he must have misunderstood. {
10
}

Sodomy or not, initiation or not, co-ed school, girls’ school or boys’, all the dangers of promiscuity—a scrambling of the “good” code—prowl around a child as soon as he leaves the family nest and finds himself among his peers. Just imagine that a “big guy” lends his book to the “little guys,” imagine that secondary school sex education trickles down to the primary grades through the intermediary of the “locker room.” It would be one of the least obligations of student solidarity. But what’s the use of their having so skillfully written each volume, their having falsified information, pulled off their fraud, censored, deceived, frightened, sickened? Imagine that some cute little detail removed from the book gets around, and the construct of lies in which preadolescents were being ensnared will be dashed to pieces.

All the efficiency of indoctrination is due on one hand to the impossibility of experiencing a desire freely during the years when that freedom would undermine our rickety codes and our quaintprohibitions; and on the other, to non-communication among minors. The first is acquired, because society sees to it, but the second?

Can one count absolutely on the segregations that already exist and that are taught and reinforced by adults? Little children spurned by bigger ones, preadolescents spurned by adolescents, who are in turn spurned by young people getting out of school. (If you want to transform an antiestablishment type of 18–20 into a conscientious and even often brutal junior cop, put a gang of 12- or 14-year-old children into his clutches—cf. summer camp, boarding school, etc. We hate being subjected to one form of order and love inflicting another form on others. And that’s why it’s enough to grant a smidgen of official power to a rebel to change him into a flunkey. The formula is as old as time itself.)

Segregation between rich and poor children, middle class and technical-school students, girls and boys, the strong and the weak, fat and thin, foreigner and French, etc. Everything that differentiates serves to generate inequality, build hierarchy, separate; and contacts among children for the most part respect social communities established by adults.

In despite of this, minors are still somewhat capable of speaking to each other on a superficial level, associating ritually and—all economic divides and all types of racism taken into account—getting along with each other well enough. That survival of civilization, of socialibity intensely displeases parents, who endeavor to put an end to it by controlling the friendships of their offspring, limiting their going out, selecting and directing their leisure activities. Without school, we’d be at the point at which children, adolescents no longer met one another except when they went out into the street, each of them held by hand or by word, nondetachable from dad-mom; and they would exchange startled looks from afar, the way a dog on aleash extends its muzzle toward another dog on a leash when two ladies-who-love-dogs walk cantankerously past one another on the same sidewalk. The nuclear family on the prowl, tense, anxious and huddled together like the old comic-strip family, the Fenouillards, out tiger-hunting, is already a common site on our quietest streets. We also know that such outrageous privatization of childhood is particularly French. Only the middle class is economically sound enough to practice it rigorously; but it is the family ideal of the other classes, whose lack of money, time and space doesn’t allow them to devote themselves to it as perfectly.

Consequently, what remains of the child’s life in society can compromise the long and patient internalization of the propaganda. Solution: any noninstitutional relations will be prohibited; they should walk around with a sign on their stomach: Attention: freshly censored, do not touch.

It’s disturbing that the barrier “protecting” childhood actually resembles the fence around a demolition site.

When it comes to promiscuity and children, the
Encyclopedia
has had the courage to go quite far in anticipating the dangers of brainwashing for which it can put you at risk. But decency limits this virtuous daring; and for lack of being able really to penetrate the secretiveness of the world of “minors,” it is reduced to brandishing the specter of it to prevent the child from taking refuge in it. He must fear or hate bad companions, see in each child who is free or “different” someone who is sick, in each unknown adult a dangerous nut; must receive not a shred of uncontrolled information without showing it immediately to Dad; he must sur-privatize, go everywhere with his family ahead of him, as if surrounded by an invisible cord cordon from the riot squad; and finally, he must be afraid, afraid, afraid and afraid.

We may now summarize this state-of-the-art technique of castration. Take hold of the child very gently, quietly, amuse him with images, tell him some tall stories, keep him from tensing up, encourage him very patiently to open his thighs, increase the “cuddles” to reassure him—suddenly grab his dick and tear it off with a sharp movement.

Explain to him that like that he’ll be happy from now on; and as proof show him the hell he’s escaping. Here it is:

I admit that this photo disturbed me the first time I saw it in the handbook for 10–13-year-olds. No matter how well I knew that neither decorated doctors, parents of schoolchildren nor homosexuals-who-want-to-marry-before-God have little liking for pedophiles (who do so much harm to these three worthy social categories), I never would have expected that in 1973 we’d dig up such an old scarecrow, a boogeyman so moth-eaten and pathetic. Maybe it will become a sign of the endearing period that produced the mentality of those who are reviving it, for the edification of today’s children. But of course, Dad believes in it.

In any case, if this image doesn’t represent any real human being, it still has some reality in the “collective unconscious” of the middle class: because it personifies Evil, Sex and the Other. I’d believed that this trinity of a god-demon was dead—but yet again, what the priests have abandoned, medicine hangs on to.

We are at the end of the book, at the moment of the great putting on guard that follows all lessons in French liberty. Immediately after the condemnation of the masturbatory 0%, and before the book concludes with the happiness of the family (running wildly in the fields, a double-page photo):
They have put down the book, and all four have gone to feel the cool grass under their bare feet. Turn the page and see their joy!
In passing, we will make note of this eulogy to an elitist pleasure: for middle class people who have some grass in the country are the same ones who prohibit less lucky children with or without shoes who don’t leave the city from walking on the lawns of public parks. Can’t they understand that happiness isn’t trampling the grass that you find but working well and obeying well so that you can buy some for yourself and surround it with a lovely picket fence?

I had the feeling that this succession of images, the-horrible-man-in-the-park-tragedy and the well-neutered-family-happiness had something tendentious about it. It resembled the other complex of information: contraception-nasty-condom preceding the avalancheof lovely babies and the long dialogues about pregnancy-reward. All in all, it seemed as if it were proving a bit too well, and even a little too much, that sex education doesn’t exactly have the intentions it claims to, but rather those I was saying it has. The text that accompanies the horrible photo, and which I will barely comment upon, passes onto some full confessions. See for yourself:

Dad searches the two young faces as if he were trying to guess something. Then he quietly asks a burning question:

“Have you already encountered any exhibitionists?”

“Any what?”

“Men who hang around primary schools and high schools, for example, and show their penis by sneakily and a bit shamefully opening their coat.” Jean nods:

“I saw one in the park. I got scared and looked away. I was all alone and he hid himself before showing his open fly. Is it a sickness?”

“These men aren’t dangerous. They obviously had some problems when they were children. But no one noticed and tried to understand them… So their sexuality never reached a normal stage, and later they do this to get even. They target children. Probably the fear that you felt gave him a little pleasure. That’s all.”

“He wouldn’t have ever tried to touch me?”

“Definitely not. But there are other sexually sick people who are very dangerous, and since you’re children, you can’t identify them. They’re ‘sadists,’ who sometimes feel a horrible need to harm little boys or little girls. Those are the ones who speak to children, offer them presents, candy, ice cream, toys, to attract them. You must never go with an unknown person who’s being extremely nice. It’s a trap. If he insists and comes after you: shout, call for help. People will understand immediately without your having to explain the situation. Besides, those kind of men are always very cowardly and run away at your first call.”

How do pedophiles cope in a country where having sex with consenting minors (whether they’re ten or sixteen) {
11
} leads to prison? If they’re rich, it’s very simple: they wait patiently for their vacations and indulge in a very thriving pedophiliac sex tourism, for which vacation clubs and travel agents are glad to serve them: Mediterranean countries in Europe or Africa, the Middle East, South America, India, Pakistan, noncommunist countries in Asia, etc. The geography of the permitted is at least as vast as that of the prohibited, the laws or customs that specify minimum age vary incredibly from one place to another, the pedophilias of custom, religion, hospitality or prostitution are combined, and what will get you lynched in one place wins you a fond smile from parents elsewhere. Therefore pedophiles, who are
always very cowardly, run away
on the
first
plane that will take them to a tolerant country. Good riddance, but the worst ones are still around: the ones who are broke.

These are the “danger,” whose story Dad just told—by concealing their multitude beneath two dreadful masks: the-man-who-shows and the man-who-kills. It isn’t a matter of pederasts themselves in the father’s tale because he’d only be able to say one thing about them: they like to have sex with you and you shouldn’t have sex with them—nor with anyone.

And the liberal’s discourse would have at least to justify such a prohibition, and that would engender a flood of questions and answers that would reveal everything that has been censored on page after page on behalf of the pro-birth stance and the castration of children.