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Authentic childhood

Posted by Dante on Saturday, August 30 2014 at 0:40:07PM
In reply to Re: And therein lies the irony. posted by EthanEdwards on Friday, August 29 2014 at 10:54:12PM

"Children may not inherently feel bad about sexual touching, but it's not usually a notable positive deal for them either."

I'm not sure what children you know.

Again, the distinction between which rubbed parts constitute a sex act and which don't is something even adults haven't fully sussed out. Children know that its meaningless.

And everyone knows that isolating children from touch is bad.

So here we must disagree. Touching IS a notably positive deal for kids. And all of it is as sexual as any of it to them.

"It's when adult preferences come in that I get uneasy. Especially when those preferences are strong and the child doesn't really get why it's so interesting to the adult."

If you were gay, I might believe that you meant what you say about understanding the sexual interests of the other as a necessary condition. But as it stands two parties can assent to share and experience for different reasons.

Is it exploitive when I share a movie by watching it with another who has never seen it? Surely I could just point them to the theatre or hand them the DVD; and then their experience of watching it without me would be symmetrical with mine of seeing it without them. When I choose to share a film this way I am experiencing both the film and the companionship very differently from them. But if they want to do it and I want to do it does it matter that we take something different away?

No Hetero can claim with a straight face ( pardon the pun ) that he knows why the woman assents to the sex act he assents to when he cannot understand what she takes away from it.

Heck, most contracts in society are between two parties who don't remotely want the same thing for the same reasons. And understanding doesn't really enter into it.

Another example is commercial broadcast TV. We watch for the shows. They broadcast to sell ad spots. Even the person so naive as to believe that revenue derives directly from the entertainment value of the show can assent to participate in the user-end of an advert-selling scheme.

"Yes, Sally, I've played princess with you for an hour now and you really liked that, and it would really mean a LOT to me if I can play around in your panties."

You really should write for SVU. Your dialogue sound's like their invented fake Pedo cliche. OTOH, anyone who is a responsible Pedo and has had to try to deny a girl what she wants while making sure she doesn't feel shamed by the rebuff knows that the actual script places the dialogue in her mouth.

Now we both know that there are bad guys out there. And that their manipulations are far more blunt than your script. But this has nothing to do with trying to deny touch or love to a child. In fact its quite the opposite. Since you're currently interested in "survivor's stories" you really ought to read the book Tiger, Tiger by Margaux Fragoso in order to see how parents who withhold love and affection pregroom the child for the predator. Or for that matter, read The Tricky Part by Martin Moran to see how discouraging agency and promoting obedience also pregrooms children for predators.

As I have come to understand it, the sexually assertive strong willed child will be of no interest to the predator. The Child Molester singles out the unloved neglected child who seeks the affection they're denied at home. But because all of this requires secrecy they further need a child who has been taught to defer to their elders. Its also better if the child has been silenced by the parents and is used to keeping secrets about what the parents don't want to hear.

In theory the responsible Pedo could act as a blocker against the Molester. They could build up the child's independence and support the child's autonomy in order to help make them as Molester-proof as most kids are. And in a world without AoCs, they could even allow for the child's exploration of an authentic independent self to be sexual.

"Here are some other cases, with some overlap to ones I've probably raised before.

You tell the kid if she goes out to your lawn and digs up 200 dandelions down to the roots, you'll let her have ten new mint-condition pennies."


And here I thought that you believed that the parent's knew best about what allowances to set. :)

Child-labor solves this one by setting a market-value. ( As does a parent who pays a reasonable wage for household chores. )

Though anyone whose been around kids young enough to believe that ten sparkly pennies are boucoup bux will also know just how many dandelions before she says, "f*ckin' 'ell" and wanders off to play in the sprinkler.

"You offer her a bowl of ice cream. You know from talking to her that her parents don't let her have ice cream in the afternoon because they think it spoils her appetite for dinner. No quid pro quo, but she'll like you for it."

If the family dinner table is nothing but an exercise in obedience, then her parents lost her long ago.

Guess what? Real parents have to deal with this all the time if'n the kids aren't prisoners. And you learn to live with the fact that your daughter's BFF's parents forgot that there was a snack-cutoff.

I speak as a parent when I say that my Ellen would've wanted it both ways. She'd be likely to take the snack, and then be resentful that she had no appetite for her father's chili while it was fresh ( rather than a reheat. [ And yes, I must confess that the one thing Julia truly missed about her first husband was his cooking. Me, I can't boil water. ] )

But Ellen would've learned quickly that ice creams tend to taste alike but that Don's chili was better than store-bought snax. Though she was a funny child when it came to wanting things both ways. She's decide to settle things with a coin-flip. .... And then she'd keep flipping until the decision went the way she wanted to choose. .... "OK, best 4 out of 7." I believe that this was due to the fact that EVERY choice precludes its alternative. I don't think she wanted to take responsibility for choosing one movie over another if she might not end up liking her choice. So Ellen made her choices anyway and outsourced responsibility.

"For those same shiny pennies, you tell the kid to go outside and yell racial slurs within hearing of your neighbors. She has no idea what they mean, but she likes to yell things and wants to make you happy. Maybe you don't even need to offer the reward."

If she hasn't heard them yet and learned that they carry consequences, then she soon will without me. I suspect most kids hear them before they fully comprehend them.

I remember seeing two caucasian kids beating the cr*p out of each other with the taunt, "fight, fight, its a n*gger and a white," being chanted. And keep in mind that THIS was in geodesic dome hippyland.

So you go home and your parents explain, if they haven't already, how hurtful these words are. ( And it also sinks in not much later that if little white bhoys use hate speech, they tend to get punched by those whose feelings are hurt. )

But again, this sounds like a parental fail to me. And unless she's groomed to keep secrets from her parents by her parents she'll soon learn that you were trying to get her in trouble for your amusement.

Again, ( trip down memory lane ) some bullies did try to do similar things to me. I was a coward even though I was an independent minded coward. But so too are they. Bullies try to goad actions that they won't be around to see, because they don't want to get caught. So the coward's way out is to pretend you don't know what you're being asked to do later; and then.... just not do it.

But that takes a child who is not deferring to their elders; because bullies inevitably pick on younger kids.

"She's quite a small girl and you offer her twenty brand new shiny pennies in exchange for, um, her panties?"

Sorry. Everyone knows that you have to buy used panties in Yen. ;p

Again, in reality the trade will probably be something else and initiated by a schoolmate. It is survivable.

Here, if you were ever a child or a parent you know that the convo at home starts with, "You traded your lunch box to Mandy for two dollars? Do you know how much it costs? What's Mandy's mother's phone number?"

At this point the obvious anticipated retrieval request ought to be very off-putting to the panty collector.

And again market value sets the price.

In Japan used costs more than store-bought. If the panty-seller meet the replacement cost AND nets a profit?......

I imagine the Japanese convo, "Keiko, its been five years now. Not only do your Hello Kitty panties never soil nor wear, but they seem to increase in size to keep up with your growth. Tell the truth. Its not the same pair, is it?"

"I don't have the ethics all worked out, but I think you would do much better to get parental permission for all of those things first, and it's a pretty good bet you wouldn't get it for any of them (MAYBE the dandelions).

If she has no opinions of her own but only the choice of which adult desire to defer to, the both the Pedo AND the parent have already lost and the Molester has won.

"One rule is you make sure parents are informed of anything you do with their child, especially if it is at all controversial. I hope most people's intuitions agree with me here."

That's really up to the child. If her parents are trustworthy, you'll know from her soon enough. If you see that they act as influences and mentors and not as authorities then you'll know that keeping her other guides on the same page is a good thing.

If they aren't trustworthy, if she's already living a secret life because they've made it clear that her authentic self is unwanted then they're delivering her into the hands of the Molester. You can choose to keep out of the affairs of strangers, or you can choose to support the child and try to encourage Molester-proofing them, even if its against their parents' interest in having a malleable beaten-down child.

Read Fragoso and Moran to see how many kids fall through the cracks. This isn't the kind of abuse the system is designed to catch. It falls under the heading of "custodial interference" if the parents assert their rights to keep children as agency-free as the laws encourage. But I believe its an ethical obligation to support her independence.

It would be nice to see you occasionally reveal something indicating that you were a child or are a parent. I believe its possible to do this without outing yourself. But most of your hypotheticals have a counterpart in perfectly common experiences all children and parents have had; only that they seem to exist in some alternate reality where none of them play-out the way they do in RL.

But hey, thanks for the opportunity to reminisce about Ellen's coin-flips.

Dante

Dante





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