Sex Attitudes
I have never had a pupil who did not bring to Summerhill a diseased attitude toward sexuality and bodily functions. The children of modern parents who were told the truth about where babies come from have much the same hidden attitude toward sex that the children of religious fanatics have. To find a new orientation to sex is the most difficult task of the parent and teacher.
We know so little of the causes of the sex taboo that we can only hazard guesses as to its origin. Why there is a sex taboo is of no immediate concern to me. That there is a sex taboo is of great concern to a man entrusted to cure repressed children.
We adults were corrupted in infancy; we can never be free about sex matters.
Consciously, we may be free; we may even be members of a society for the sex education of children. But I fear that unconsciously we remain to a large extent what conditioning in infancy made of us: haters of sex and fearers of sex.
I am quite willing to believe that my unconscious attitude toward sex is the Calvinistic attitude a Scottish village imposed on me in my first years of life. Possibly there is no salvation for adults; but there is every chance of salvation for children, if we do not force on them the awful ideas of sex that were forced on us.
Early in life, the child learns that the sexual sin is the great sin. Parents invariably punish most severely for an offense against sex morality. The very people who rail against Freud because he “sees sex in everything” are the ones who have told sex stories, have listened to sex stories, have laughed at sex stories. Every man who has been in the army knows that the language of the army is a sex language. Nearly everyone likes to read the spicy accounts of divorce cases and of sex crimes in the Sunday papers, and most men tell their wives the stories they bring home from their clubs and bars.
Now our delight in a sex story is due entirely to our own unhealthy education in sex matters. The savory sex interest is due to repressions. The story, as Freud says, lets the cat out of the bag. The adult condemnation of sex interest in the child is hypocritical and is humbug; the condemnation is a projection, a throwing of the guilt onto others. Parents punish severely for sex offenses because they are vitally, if unhealthily, interested in sex offenses.
Why is the crucifixion of the flesh so popular? Religious people believe that the flesh drags one downward. The body is called vile: it tempts one to evil. It is this hatred of the body that makes talk of childbirth a subject for dark corners of the schoolroom, and that makes polite conversation a cover up for everyday plain facts of life.
Freud saw sex as the greatest force in human behavior. Every honest observer must agree.
But moral instruction has over emphasized sex. The first correction that a mother makes, when the child touches his sexual organ, makes sex the most fascinating and mysterious thing in the world. To make fruit forbidden is to make it delectable and enticing.
The sex taboo is the root evil in the suppression of children. I do not narrow the word sex down to genital sex. It is likely that the child at the breast feels unhappy if his mother disapproves of any part of her own body, or impedes his pleasure in his own body.
Sex is the basis of all negative attitudes toward life. Children who have no sex guilt never ask for religion or mysticism of any kind. Since sex is considered the great sin, children who are fairly free from sex fear and sex shame do not seek any God from whom they can ask pardon or mercy, because they do not feel guilty.
When I was six my sister and I discovered each other’s genitals and naturally played with each other. Discovered by our mother, we were severely thrashed; and I was locked in a dark room for hours, and then made to kneel down and ask forgiveness from God.
It took me decades to get over that early shock; and, indeed, I sometimes wonder if I ever fully got over it.
How many of today’s adults have had a similar experience? How many of today’s children are having their whole natural love of life changed into hate and aggression because of such treatment? They are being told that touching the genitals is bad or sinful and that natural bowel movements are disgusting.
Every child who is suffering from sex suppression has a stomach like a board. Watch a repressed child breathe and then look at the beautiful grace with which a kitten breathes.
No animal has a stiff stomach, nor is self-conscious-about sex or defecation.
In his well-known work, Character Analysis, Wilhelm Reich pointed out that a moralistic training not only warps the thinking process, but also enters structurally into the body itself, armoring it literally with stiffness in posture and contraction of pelvis. I agree with Reich. I have observed, during many years of dealing with a variety of children at
Summerhill, that when fear has not stiffened the musculature, the young walk, run, jump and play with a wonderful grace.
What then can we do to prevent sex suppression in children? Well, for one thing, from the earliest moment the child must be completely free to touch any and every part of his body.
A psychologist friend of mine had to say to his son of four, “Bob, you must not play with your wee-wee when you are out among strange people, for they think it bad. You must do it only at home and in the garden.”
My friend and I talked about it and agreed that it is impossible to guard the child against the anti-life haters of sex. The only comfort is that when the parents are sincere believers in life, the child will generally accept the parental standards and is likely to reject the outside prudery. But all the same, the mere fact that a child of five learns that he cannot bathe in the sea without pants is enough to form some kind--if only a minor kind--of sex distrust.
Today many parents put no ban on masturbation. They feel that it is natural, and they know the dangers of suppressing it. Excellent. Fine.
But some of these enlightened parents balk at the next step. Some do not mind if their little boys have sex play with other little boys, but they stiffen with alarm if a small boy and a small girl have sex play.
If my good, well-meaning mother had ignored the sex play of my year younger sister and me, our chances of growing up with some sanity toward sex would have been good.
I wonder how much impotence and frigidity in adults dates from the first interference in a heterosexual relationship of early childhood. I wonder how much homosexuality dates from the tolerance of homosexual play and the forbidding of heterosexual play.
Heterosexual play in childhood is the royal road; I believe, to a healthy, balanced adult sex life. When children have no moralistic training in sex, they reach a healthy
adolescence-- not an adolescence of promiscuity.
I know of no argument against youth’s love life that holds water. Nearly every argument is based on repressed emotion or hate of life - the religious, the moral, the expedient, the arbitrary, the pornographic. None answer the question why nature gave man a strong sex instinct, if youth is to be forbidden to use it unless sanctioned by the elders of society.
Those elders, some of them, have shares in companies that run films full of sex appeal, or in companies that sell all sorts of cosmetics to make girls more delectable to boys, or companies that publish magazines which make sadistic pictures and stories a magnet to their readers.
I know that adolescent sex life is not practical today. But my opinion is that it is the right way to tomorrow’s health. I can write this, but if in Summerhill I approved of my
adolescent pupils sleeping together, my school would be suppressed by the authorities. I am thinking of the long tomorrow when society will have realized how dangerous sex repression is.
I do not expect every Summerhill pupil to be un-neurotic, for who can be complex-free in society today? What I hope for is that in generations to come this beginning of freedom from artificial sex taboos will ultimately fashion a life-loving world.
The invention of contraceptives must in the long run lead to a new sex morality, seeing that fear of consequences is perhaps the strangest factor in sex morality. To be free, love must feel itself safe.
Youth today has little opportunity for loving in the true sense. Parents will not allow sons or daughters to live in sin, as they call it, so that young lovers have to seek damp woods or parks or automobiles. Thus everything is loaded heavily against our young people.
Circumstances compel them to convert what should be lovely and joyful into something sinister and sinful, into smut and leers, and shameful laughter.
The taboos and fears that fashioned sex behavior are those same taboos and fears that produce the perverts who rape and strangle small girls in parks, the perverts who torture Jews and Negroes.
Sex prohibition anchors sex to the family. The masturbation prohibition forces a child to interest himself in the parents. Every time a mother smacks a child’s hands for touching his genitals, the sex drive of the child gets constellated with his mother, and the hidden attitude toward the mother becomes one of desire and repulsion, love and hate.
Repression flourishes in an un-free home. Repression helps to retain adult authority, but at the price of a plethora of neurosis.
If sex were allowed to go over the garden wall to the boy or girl next door, the authority of the home would be in danger; the tie to father and mother would loosen and the child would automatically leave the family emotionally. It sounds absurd but those ties are a very necessary pillar of support to the authoritative state - just as prostitution was a necessary safeguard for the morality of nice girls from nice homes Abolish sex repression and youth will be lost to authority.
Fathers and mothers are doing what their parents did to them: bringing up respectable, chaste children, conveniently forgetting all the hidden sex play and pornographic stories of their own childhood, forgetting the bitter rebellion against their parents that they had to repress with infinite guilt. They do not realize that they are giving their own children the same guilt feelings that gave them miserable nights many long years ago.
Man’s serious neurosis starts with the earliest genital prohibitions: Touch not. The impotence, frigidity, and anxiety of later life date from the tying up of the hands or the snatching away of the hands, usually with a spank. A child left to touch its genitals has every chance of growing up with a sincere, happy attitude toward sex. Sex play among small children is a natural, healthy act that ought not to be frowned on. On the contrary, it should be encouraged as a prelude to a healthy adolescence and adulthood. Parents are ostriches hiding their heads in the sand if they are ignorant that their children have sex play in dark corners. This kind of clandestine and furtive play breeds a guile that lives on in later life, a guilt that usually betrays itself in disapproval of sex play when these same children become parents. Bringing sex play out into the light is the only sane thing to do.
There would be infinitely less sex crime in the world if sex play were accepted as normal.
That is what moral parents cannot see or dare not see, that sex crime and sex abnormality of any kind are a direct result of disapproval of sex in early childhood.
The famous anthropologist, Malinowski, tells us that there was no homosexuality among the Trobrianders until the shocked missionaries segregated boys and girls in separate hostels. There was no rape among the Trobrianders, no sex crimes. Why! Because small children were given no repressions about sex.
The question for parents today is this: Do we want our children to be like us? If so, will society continue as it is, with rape and sex murder and unhappy marriages and neurotic children? If the answer to the first question is yes, then the same answer must be given to the second question. And both answers are the prelude to atomic destruction, because they postulate the continuance of hate and the expression of this hate in wars.
I ask moralist parents: Will you worry much about your children’s sex play when the atomic bombs begin to drop? Will the virginity of your daughters assume great importance when clouds of atomic energy make life impossible? When your sons are conscripted for the Great Death, will you still hold on to your little chapel faith in the suppression of all that is good in childhood? Will the God you blasphemously pray to then save your life and those of your children?
Some of you may answer that this life is only the beginning, that in the next world there will be no hate, no war, no sex. In that case, shut this book--for we have no contact.
To me, eternal life is a dream--an understandable dream indeed-for man has failed in practically everything except mechanistic invention. But the dream is not good enough. I want to see heaven on earth, not in the clouds. And the pathetic thing is that most people want the same thing. They want, but haven’t the will to reach it, the will that was
perverted by the first slap, the first sex taboo.
For a parent there is no sitting on the fence, no neutrality. The choice is between guilty-secret sex or open-healthy-happy sex. If parents choose the common standard of morality, they must not complain of the misery of sex-perverted society, for it is the result of this moral code. Parents then must not hate war, for the hate of self that they give their children will express itself in war. Humanity is sick, emotionally sick, and it is sick because of this guilt and the anxiety acquired in childhood. The emotional pest is everywhere in our society.
When Zoe was six she came to me and said, “Willie has the biggest cock among the small kids, but Mrs. X [a visitor] says it is rude to say cock.” I at once told her that it was not rude. Inwardly, I cursed that woman for her ignorant and narrow understanding of children. I might tolerate propaganda about politics or manners, but when anyone attacks a child by making that child guilty about sex, I fight back vigorously.
All our leering attitude toward sex, our guffaws in music halls, our scribbling of obscenities on urinal walls spring from the guilty feeling arising from suppression of
masturbation in infancy and from driving mutual sex play into holes and corners. There is secret sex play in every family; and because of the secrecy and guilt, there are many fixations on brothers and sisters that last throughout life and make happy marriages impossible. If sex play between brother and sister at the age of five were accepted as natural, each of them would advance freely to a sex object outside the family.
The extreme forms of sex hate are seen in sadism. No man with a good sex life could possibly torture an animal, or torture a human, or support prisons. No sex-satisfied woman would condemn the mother of a bastard.
Of course, I lay myself open to the accusation: “This man has sex on the brain. Sex isn’t everything in life. There is friendship, work, joy, and sorrow. Why sex?”
I answer: Sex affords the highest pleasure in life. Sex with love is the supreme form of ecstasy because it is the supreme form of both giving and receiving. Yet sex is obviously hated; otherwise no mother would forbid masturbation-no father forbid a sex life outside conventional marriage. Otherwise, there would be no obscene jokes in vaudeville halls, nor would the public waste its time seeing love films and reading love stories; it would be practicing love.
The fact that nearly every motion picture deals with love proves that sex is the most important factor in life. The interest in these films is, in the main, neurotic. It is the interest of sex- guilty, sex-frustrated people. Unable to love naturally because of sex guilt, they flock to film stories that make love romantic, even beautiful. The
sex-repressed live out their interest in sex by proxy. No man, no woman with a full love life could be bothered sitting twice a week in a movie house seeing trashy pictures which are only imitations of real life.
So it is also with popular novels. They either deal with sex or with crime, usually a combination of the two. A very popular novel, Gone with the Wind, was a favorite, not because of the background of the tragedy of the Civil War and the slaves, but because it centered around a tiresome, egocentric girl and her love affairs.
Fashion journals, cosmetics, leg shows, highbrow sophisticated reviews, sex stories all show dearly that sex is the most important thing in life. At the same time, they prove that only the trappings of sex are approved of--in other words, fiction, films, leg shows.
It was D. H. Lawrence who pointed out the iniquity of sex films, where the sex-repressed youth, fearful of actual girls in sex in his own circle, showers all his sex emotion on a Hollywood star-and then goes home to masturbate. Lawrence, of course, did not mean that masturbation is wrong; he meant that it is unhealthy sex that seeks masturbation with the fantasy of a film star. Healthy sex would most surely seek a partner in the
neighborhood.
Think of the enormous vested interests that thrive on repressed sex: the fashion people, the lipstick merchants, the church, the theaters and movies, the best-seller novelists, and
Think of the enormous vested interests that thrive on repressed sex: the fashion people, the lipstick merchants, the church, the theaters and movies, the best-seller novelists, and