From: chapin@cbnewsc.cb.att.com ( Tom Chapin )
Subject: Re: Adults, Children and sex
Date: Fri, 4 Sep 1992 19:50:19 GMT

ljf writes:
>What examples?  
>
>I have yet to hear of any stories of people who were having sex with
>an adult at 5, 6, 7, or 8 tell how positive those experiences were.

As I mentioned in my email of a couple days ago, I was not the only
person involved (at age 4 or 5).  Other children eagerly assented,
and eagerly volunteered for other turns.  They showed every evidence
of positive feelings, though, again, it is now second hand and I
can't get to them to find out if they showed some horrible reaction
decades later (but I very much doubt it...)

>I've said repeatedly that I've a few men talk of being 12 or 13 and
>having sexual experiences with adult men and being happy about it.

You appear to be moving toward an "age of consent" around 11.  I
have tried to get around to saying any age-based rather than
maturity-based criterion creates more harm than it solves...
including the harm it would cause you if you were confronted by
someone who thinks you are promoting child molestation by not 
touting their own preferred age.  (Notice the shit you could
receive in even this newsgroup if you were to even suggest that
you knew of examples in which children escaped harm.)

>>Of course harm occurs.  Abuse is a very wide-spread and
>>tragic problem.  But it isnt the act thats abusive.
>
>The act can very well be abusive.  To be sodomized or forced to
>perform fellatio can hurt, especially when you're a young child.

You are distorting his words.  He already said abuse can happen,
and just concurred with you that "forced" (repeat "forced") sexual
acts are abuse.  No one--of any age--will consent to forced acts
which are hurting them (leaving out the case of BnD here).  Now
let's please get back to the point.  What if the act does not hurt?

I am assuming you will then backpedal and say that even if the act
causes no physical injury or pain, surely there must be some
emotional injury or pain.  Please specify what it is and what
evidence is acceptable to determine whether emotional injury or pain
occurred.  And--just as important--what will you accept as evidence
that injury or pain did not occur?  If your requests for such
evidence are genuine, you will be ready to specify what evidence it
would take to falsify your hypothesis.

>To me, what you're saying is that if a person is raped, her/his only
>trauma is the lack of consent.  

No one has said that or anything resembling it.  What has been said
is that there exist examples of those who have refused consent
without trauma, and that there exist those who have consented (in
the real sense, not necessarily the legal sense) to sexual activities
of various types without trauma.  The existence of these people do
not deny the existence of those who have been harmed, and the
existence of those who have been harmed do not deny the existence of
those who have.

Are you telling those people that they do not know their lived
history despite the fact that they lived it themselves, and that you
know their lived history better than they do?

>I'm curious as to where you think it stops.  

How about whenever either party requests that it stop?

>If you think rape trials with adult victims
>are nasty, what do you think trials with child victims will be like?

I feel trials are abusive to all parties involved.  The legal system
has shown itself to be incompetent in lowering the incidence of
abuse.  Don't you think it might be worth a try to think up
something else?

>I've read studies that report infants of several hours old show
>vaginal lubrication in females and erections in males.  Does that mean
>the infants are sexual, that they want sex?  Maybe here's the problem.
>I can see where these infants are sexual (or are hardwired for sexual
>responses), but I can't by any stretch of the imagination say that
>these infants want sex.  

Get ready to stretch your imagination, with information that has
been readily available for the last forty years:

"What seem to be sexual responses have been observed in infants
 immediately after birth, and specifically sexual responses,
 involving the full display of physiologic changes which are
 typical of the responses of an adult, have been observed in both
 female and male infants as young as four months of age....
 Masturbation (self-stimulation) is an essentially normal and quite
 frequent phenomenon among many children, both female and male [and]
 is not infrequently the source of orgasm among small girls....
 We have....records of observations made...on...pre-adolescent girls
 and pre-adolescent boys under four years of age. ...  Of the
 females in our sample, 27% recalled that they had been aroused
 erotically before the age of adolescence....48% of the adult
 females in the sample had recalled some sort of pre-adolescent sex
 play."
	- Alfred Kinsey, Wardell Pomeroy, Clyde Martin, and Paul
	  Gebhard, _Sexual Behavior in the Human Female_,
	  Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders, 1953, pp. 103-109.


>I know many people who were sexually
>abused as kids and the harmful effects it's had in their lives.  I
>have not yet heard one adult tell of anything positive or how they
>approached adults sexually when they were five.  

If you heard, or if you have already heard, would you be listening?

I know you want to be intellectually honest, but in this very
posting you have several times misinterpreted the words of others
as they were filtered through your own remembered pain.  You can
listen to others when they speak of events that occurred at an age
*other* than when you were abused, but are you really ready to let
in information when it comes so close to your own period of trauma?

-- 
	     tom chapin                tjc@hrcce.att.com