Sexuality and Children

I'm frustrated...and angry...and annoyed. Probably not the best time to be blogging. But when I get righteously indignant about something it can be hard to know what to do with all of the emotions. Especially if I'm not really in a place to be able to do a ton about what I perceive to be a problem. Today the issue is sexuality and children. 

On my way home from grocery shopping this morning I caught the first portion of a discussion on the sexualization of children in our culture and it certainly got my hackles up. Not because I disagree, but because I see it all around me, all the time. One of the individuals invited to speak to the issue brought up a Katy Perry video where she's half-naked squirting whip cream from her cupcake breasts. Now I haven't seen this video, and quite honestly I don't want to. But I also don't want my nieces to see it. I'm not a prude. I value healthy sexual expression. But I really wonder how on earth any child today is supposed to learn to value themselves and others as sexual beings, rather than sexualized objects.

The same individual also brought up the appearance of push-up bras for 8-9 year olds, something I have noticed for quite some time. Training bras are not what they used to be. But what really angered me was hearing that recently a company in France came out with an entire line of lingerie for little ones. By little ones, I don't mean petite women. I mean 5 and 6 year olds. What are we doing here? Really? You can tell me all you want that there's nothing wrong with kids having pretty things, and that they don't understand that lingerie is usually associated with sexual intercourse, or that they just want to look like their mommies, but I'm not convinced that it's okay. All I am is angry. You have taken a beautiful human being, a child, and dressed her up to look like a teeny tiny porn star. We are opposed to child porn, right?

All this comes on the heels of hearing discussions on bullying in schools, on being allies for LGBT youth, and about sex education in schools. And I think that all of these things are intimately connected. It's all about respect. Respect for one's own self, respect for the selves of others and refusing to stand by when human beings are being disrespected. And we try to teach kids respect...a little. We tell them that schools are no bully zones. But then we don't enforce the rules, because the "bully" is really an okay kid. It wasn't really bullying. Nobody got hit, and nobody got anything stolen. She just called him gay. She doesn't really know what that means. It's really not a big deal. But it is a big deal. A very big deal. "Gay" is not a swear word. And some may argue, then what's the problem? The problem is that there are gay people in the world and there are children with gay parents and they are human beings. 

Sometimes we tell children that their bodies are good, and that they should respect their bodies. But then little girls watch women doing everything in their power to make themselves look like something they are not. And little boys watch men watching women, particularly those who have tight clothes, less clothes, or no clothes. 

Many people say we can't talk about sex with young kids at school. Grade 2 is really too young, kids don't really know anything about sex. Grade 3 is really too young...grade 4 is really too young...grade 5 is really too young...oh shoot there's a young girl crying in my office because she's been assaulted.  And there's a young boy sitting next to her saying what's the big deal. There's a girl who just came out as a lesbian taking the long way home from school in order to avoid being beaten to a pulp. There's a boy glued to his ipad watching porn and sharing it with all his friends. There's a girl who just keeps getting thinner and thinner and a boy who's all of a sudden become muscular and moody. 

Respect. When is it too young to teach children about respect. About respect for persons. Why is a little girl old enough to see a 1/2 naked woman objectified on a bill board, but not old enough to know all her body parts, how they work, and that she's beautiful because she's human? Why is a boy old enough to slaughter people on video games and to push another kid around calling him gay, but not old enough to learn about the value of respect for person, including his own. 

When I work with children we pray together. We pray using our bodies. I don't do this in order to keep their bodies occupied so we can do the real work of praying with words. I do this because what we do with our bodies matters. We are not simply bodies, minds, souls, words, thoughts all separate and detached. We are whole beings. And what we say is connected to what we think, and what we see impacts what we feel, and what we believe determines what we do. I introduce praying with our whole selves in the hope that the next time they look at another person with scorn, or lash out with fists or words, that they remember that with those same eyes they saw God, with those same hands they touched with compassion, and with those same words they both asked for and offered forgiveness. 

And this is not a topic separate from sexuality. We each approach our day as a sexual being. Every day I am a woman. Every day he is a man. Every day she is a girl. Every day he is a boy. We interact with the world out of these bodies that are particular to us. And often peculiar to us. Sexuality is not a topic that suddenly becomes relevant at age 12. Who we are as male and female, who we are as embodied persons is always relevant. So why do we wait to talk about sexuality until puberty and then, we just talk about sex. 

I recognize that there are developmental issues to consider when talking about our sexuality. But sometimes I think we base our assessment of those issues more on fear or past experience, than on the actual being sitting in front of us. A toddler is not too young to learn that all his/her body parts have been created good and should be cared for with love and respect. A preschooler is not too young to know what it means to touch people with kindness. A child in grade 1 or 2 is not too young to learn that some families have a mommy and a daddy, and some have two mommies or two daddies, and some have just a mommy or just a daddy, and some have foster parents. These are simply descriptions of what is reality for the children in the room. And I believe that young children need to learn how they entered the world and that there are women who love men, and women who love women, and there are men who love women and men who love men. Again, these are descriptors of what children already see around them. We do them harm not to help them to acknowledge and make sense of their own experiences. I also believe we need to teach young kids what kind of sexual expression is truly respectful and what kind is not. They are learning all of this, but not from us. They learn it from bill boards, from commercials, from tv shows, from books, from the internet, from their friends, and the list goes on.

I know that there are many many people who would disagree with me on this. I know there are many people who think that talking about sex will make kids more curious about engaging in sex acts or that talking about homosexuality will make children become homosexual. But kids are engaging in sex acts, they are sexting, they are calling people names and degrading one another, they are getting pregnant and getting STD's, they are cutting themselves, they have eating disorders, they are sacrificing themselves in order to look like the porn star that they believe the boy/girl they like wants them to be and they are creating environments where it is unsafe for individuals to discover their own identities. And I believe all this is happening precisely because we refuse to talk about what it means to be a sexual being until it is too late. We allow the surrounding culture to show children what it means to be a sexual being, and then we're confused when our teens engage in sexually risky behaviour or abuse themselves or others.There is no reason to be confused. It is not confusing at all that a teenage girl who has spent the first 15 years of her life absorbing the message that she needs to be blonde, blue-eyed, large-breasted, skinny as hell, with absolutely no body hair becomes depressed, suffers from anxiety, develops an eating disorder, reads Cosmo instead of literature, has sexual intercourse with the first boy who shows her some attention, and who lashes out at heterosexual girls who threaten her position and homosexual girls who threaten her entire worldview.

We have the responsibility to talk to our children. We have the responsibility to model for them what healthy sexuality looks like. We have the responsibility to discover it for ourselves. We can talk to our children. We can encourage children to use their bodies in healthy energetic vigorous play that respects themselves and others. We can encourage little girls to climb trees and get skinned knees. We can embrace little boys who play with dolls (yes I know these are stereotypes). We cannot hide our children from all that our culture offers but neither can we trust that advertising companies are going to change and do our jobs for us. The job of an advertising agency is to make ads that sell products to make money. They do their jobs exceptionally well. As people who care for children, our job is to raise them to be men and women who respect themselves and others. If we do half the job that consumer culture does, we'll be making huge strides.