Both are terms used to deny that which is obvious to anyone who has studied children or has been around them as a caregiver; that children are actively sexual and seek sexual activity and response from others.

Sure, each child is as different from one another in sex as they are in all things. But sexual exploration and exhibition of one sort or another will show up in any community which is run as anything less than a prison.

So the myth of the asexual child runs aground on the sheer evidence that they aren't. What to do?

Well if any one outside your band of zealots has the audacity to observe the child being sexual, first blame them. "Since I don't see it myself, then it must be how little Suzy behaves around you. Therefore you caused this!"

But.... if a tree sexts in the forest when no one is around?....

What to do if you've dressed your child in a burqa sweaters, isolated them in a harem homeschool, and you still see proof that they're transmitting sexts to nobody in particular over da intarwebz? If no person is in contact with your little Gitmo detainee charge, then blame the media for teaching them unnatural behaviour that isn't theirs because they're asexual.

Ah, for the good old days of Freudian BS, when if you caught Suzy and Billy touching each others girl and boy bits you could blame it all on bad mothering. But at this point we've yo-yoed to the extreme opposite. Where parents were once blamed for everything, they are now blameless. Still its the same old notion that a child is some passive little lump of clay which cannot resist the least effort to shape their behaviour in ways contrary to their interests and natural inclinations.

Somewhere, lost in all the mystic BS was some analogy to "seduction" in adults.

But any study of the famous seducers ( I highly recommend Casanova's memoirs to those interested in 18th century history ) demonstrates that the ideas inherent in the notion of seduction are deeply flawed. They proceed out of a sex-negative culture that assumes that adult women who are "good girls" have no desire for sex. And the results gained through "seduction" are actually a conflation of those things she consents to but needed "permission" to admit she wanted and actual coercion and rape.

And thats the ultimate problem with denying kids sexual agency. Their actual behaviour demonstrates otherwise. But in pretending that they have no desires whatsoever we end up making consent indistinguishable to the outside culture from rape. And if we really want to tackle the issue of rape, then purposefully muddying the waters is the last thing we should want to do.

Dante