by Simon Carr
‘Yes, sir,’ I said, without the faintest idea of what he was talking about.
Today the language and imagery may be more varied, but children still display very much the same ignorant, darkly comic view of adult behaviour.
The important point is that even if the machinery of sex were minutely explained and apprehended, it still wouldn’t mean anything to a ten-year-old. A friend of mine bemoaned the fact that his young son knows more about sex than he does. Leaving aside the pathos inherent in the remark, it can’t really be true. Because no matter how much kissing and copulation the child has seen on the Internet (and it’s hard not to, if you’re eleven), it doesn’t mean he has the first idea of what’s actually happening. They only see the mechanics. They don’t have the apparatus to feel the yearning, the desire, the lava of hot sex. Without knowing what desire is, sex looks comic even to adults. Children might see the insanity, but they don’t feel it themselves.
Here’s a comparison of how little sexual representations touch children. Imagine you stumble across a picture of specialist sex in a magazine – but it’s not your specialism. Maybe it’s something to do with rubber, or gasmasks, or a girl peeing in the street. But because it’s not what you’re interested in you think, ‘Aren’t people peculiar!’ You don’t go, ‘Wa-hey!’ You go, ‘What do they think they’re up to?’ It’s the same, I think, for children. Not until the great hormonal change of puberty does it all become clear – or even more confused. But only after puberty do we realise what it is we are confused about.
There are some occasions when children are affected by sex. They might see their parents at it, if they are children of those extraordinary parents who do still do it. The child hears the noises of pleasure that sound so similar to the noises of pain, the encouragement that sounds so like protest. Perhaps the child also gets a clip of the visual action. That jackhammer from the back, the facial grimace from the front, that rapturous foot that rises off the bed. That does more damage than pornography, because this time it’s personal, this time it generates the real sense of exclusion. ‘I thought it was all about me?’ the child might wonder, bewildered. ‘I thought I was the point.’ The disloyalty has been unforgivable. He doesn’t even need to have seen any action, just a deep look in a moonlit square in Provence – that’s quite disgusting enough. The child has no need to witness the act to know how vile the behaviour is.
So, it’s not the machinery, the what-goes-where that counts. Sex education is wasted on the young. For those who find the lessons undesirable are wasting their indignation. They should be far more energetic suppressing the totally unregulated erotic education their children are receiving. Children find eroticism in the most unlikely places, right under their parents’ noses. Lipsticks, underwear, who knows what? A point-of-sale poster for body scent. A girl’s complexion glimpsed on the escalator. A newsreader’s lip gloss. The swell of a children’s presenter’s breasts.
Are children influenced by what they see on screen? We were; certainly we were. Some of us tried to copy the way actors walked – and would be denounced for it in the playground. ‘Look! Ha ha! He thinks he’s a movie star!’ But that swaggering walk wasn’t the only suicidal influence that those films had.
Around the age of eight or nine, having seen numberless cowboy films in which the gallows played a prominent part, I became more personally interested in hanging. Solitary capital punishment games would take place when my parents were out. A rope would go over a branch and I’d stand on the garden bench with a noose round my neck extemporising my last words to the crowd. Sometimes I’d protest my innocence and at others defiantly prepare for the darkness. Once, I fastened the other end of the rope to a branch to free both my hands for gesturing. In some way, still unclear, there was also an erotic dimension to these games, but it faded and disappeared with age.
When news stories are broadcast about young children committing suicide by hanging themselves this explanation always occurs to me first. It was a game that went wrong. Accidents can happen, although that was an accident that never happened to me.
Where children pick up these erotic charges is unknowable. What is clear is that their parents willingly – and even eagerly – take them to the most prolific source of all erotic data for five-year-olds: Disney cartoons.
Some years ago Disney had a sex scandal. Acting on a tip-off, Christians had gone frame by frame through the recently released video of The Lion King and discovered that a mischievous graphic artist had coloured the savannah grasslands in such a way as to spell the word SEX. It was shockingly clear, if you managed to freeze the single frame it appeared in (and as there are thirty frames a second this is an achievement). A concurrent row about hidden rock lyrics driving youngsters to suicide meant The Lion King caught a backwash of public outrage about evil subliminal messages.
Whether or not this particular subliminal sex message corrupted the under-eights is another discussion. But there is a more obvious fact – a whole level of Disney cartoons is absolutely awash with sex, steeped in eroticism from the grossly physical (the twitching rumps of slim-waisted vixens) to the sensually romantic (the look in the eyes of a powerful female taking possession of her heart’s desire). And this happens not in their hidden machinery of animation, but in the all-out, in-your-face, big-screen graphics. And this is powerfully affecting, because those particular lights go on early for many children, much earlier than we like to think. Some mothers find disturbing the assertion that children become aware as early as five or six. It’s an alarming thought that their innocence should start so early to be corroded, so early that their tastes, eccentricities, fetishes and erotic energies are formed and directed.
It’s not something to worry about because there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s virtually random.
The second-string film critic for The New Yorker wrote a five-thousand-word analysis of her erotic obsession with spanking. She had never been punished in this way as a child, but had witnessed her brother suffering at the hands of their nurse. The violence, the nakedness, the suffering generated some charge which stayed with her for the rest of her life.
When powerful emotions are released on children – and smacking is often connected with strong feelings – the action and the emotion become intertwined. The action produces the old emotion and the emotion produces a nostalgia for the action – they are intertwined into adulthood.
John Cleese talked about his girlfriend who would roll around in bed but at a certain moment of arousal she would abruptly stop. Therapy revealed that her father used to rough-and-tumble with her as a child, but he’d break away suddenly (and quite properly) when he realised he was getting physically aroused. His excitement invisibly communicated itself to her – and instilled in her the automatic reaction: excitement must be followed by abrupt termination of the game. And that stayed with her into adult life, the same responses to the same stimulus.
At any rate I assert this early-start theory so roundly because that’s how it happened for me. The erotic world first revealed itself to me at the age of six. And one of the major players in the drama was Walt Disney. However, we’ll start from the top with the most intense experiences first.
(1) my sister’s demanding but strangely submissive polypropylene doll. I never truly knew whether my passion was reciprocated or whether she was leading me on. Her yielding flesh, her welcoming odour, her pouting, kiss-me lips were my introduction to the mysterious world where passion and suffering meet. I don’t know what dolls do in the way of forming girls’ expectations in life, but I can certainly testify to their power over boys.
We shared a feverish intimacy for six months (and I never knew her name). Finally we went all the way. That is, as far as you can go with a six-inch, anatomically incorrect doll. Just after my eighth birthday I took her into the Inner Sanctum – a room in a connected series of upturned packing cases – and achieved full communion with her. She was stripped, kissed, turned upside-down, tied to a wooden cross and worshipped.
My routine with that doll has always struck me as a perverse and rather shameful scenario. But here, in my prime, with the truth setting us free, I told a woman friend about it and asked whether this was a reasonable bargain: you can be worshipped but you have to be crucified. She considered it only for a moment and said: ‘Are you offering?’
The dark, confused connection between love and pain had arrived too early to understand. I remember one afternoon standing by the bathroom window watching my family working in the garden. I’d run a bath, without knowing how to, so it was too cold to get into. Therefore I stood at the window, whipping my backside with a length of cord. I can remember a lot about my childhood – even, perhaps, the Coronation televised on a primitive set when I was one year old. But why this happened and is so vividly remembered from my sixth summer is obscure.
Perhaps our reading matter had something to do with it – Beano stories routinely ended either with a feast of sausage and mash or a spanking. Noddy stories provided scenes of a het-up, flushed Noddy being threatened with a ‘hard spanking’. There was Tom Sawyer volunteering for a whipping in the place of his girlfriend Becky. The connection there between love and suffering was quite explicit. The comics I read showed the highwayman Dun terrorising the country around Luton until
the town Dunstable was built to protect people from him. His death by hanging was graphically displayed, with the words ‘choke’ interspersing his last words from the gibbet. There was an emotional and also heroic quality to these punishments, feats of endurance rewarded by forgiveness.
(2) Olivia from up the road. My second erotic adventure was a six-year-old girl. Her complexion had a faultless, luminous quality which I described to myself as ‘peach-like’ as I practised kissing my pillow after lights out. Quite how I managed to articulate my feelings about Olivia is hard to say. Obviously I never said anything to her directly. Perhaps I told my mother, because she was able to arrange a tea party between her family and mine, and that was the end of that. The sense of women smiling indulgently at these affections made me want to slaughter everyone. Not even Olivia was worth that.
There was also a friend from over the road and his three-year-old sister. She made herself available one afternoon for us to fill her with ice cubes (nothing unusual there at least). My mother came into the bedroom and called a halt to the game with such marvellous calm that it’s odd I’ve remembered it at all.
(3) The third important element in my early emotional life was, in innocent terms, my invisible friend. In more potent form she was my first fantasy, my first sweet dream of a girl, my companion who joined me every night in an intoxicating eroticism. She was a brilliant, magical female who came flying in through my open window to devote her nights to me above all others. She came to witness my six-year-old feats of sacrifice and pain as I defeated fairground bullies on her behalf. She was my first proper erotic experience, the first lady of capricious, sexual magic – Tinkerbell.
Do imagine my surprise when first seeing Disney’s Peter Pan thirty years on. There she was, the little minx, exactly as I had imagined her, except her butt was cuter (except she had a butt, which my six-year-old fantasy didn’t).
The dizzy, streaked-blonde fairy is an intense animation made up of power, jealousy, passion, betrayal and a nifty little skirt that flaps up and down to show off her knickers. Her high point comes early in the film in a racy Gentlemen Prefer Blondes sequence. She is stuck in the keyhole of the sewing drawer and so is presented to the audience in a position of maximum availability. At her other end, her cheeks and lips swell and flush with rage (and oh, she is beautiful when she’s angry). She is raging with jealousy, one of the more physical emotions, as Wendy, the mumsy, haute-bourgeoise with twinkling, chase-me ankles, sews on Peter’s shadow. The wild thing and the housewife struggle for the affections of the innocent boy.
The battle continues on other fronts, if that’s the right word. When the topless mermaids welcome Peter back to his hunting grounds they press their chests against a rock, sweep their long, blonde, covering hair out of their eyes and gaze up adoringly at Peter, pleading to hear his adventures. Their naked admiration is of the very finest quality and very far from innocent.
There is also an indecently frank episode with an Indian girl. Peter and she end up pressing faces together in a firelit dance, the skirling hem of her indigenous skirt rides up her thighs while the maddening beat of the drums continues to crescendo. Like Tinkerbell, she too is wiggling her rear end in the air. Wendy immediately knows what’s going on and prepares to leave Never Never Land at once (any decent woman would).
Disney has two very specific views of females – maternal homemakers and sexual assassins – sometimes in the same persona. In a number of these films the female will render the male helpless with The Look. This is the all-revealing moment when the male is reduced to astonished compliance by a single, slaughtering encounter with a determined female’s eyes.
Mowgli gets it in The Jungle Book. At the end of the film the little village girl is singing in a low, inviting voice as she walks up the path with her water pot; she purposefully drops the pot from her head and it rolls to Mowgli’s feet (down Freud! back sir!); as he picks up the pot and proffers it, she let’s him have it. I forget just now the exact anatomy of that look but she does a trick with her eyes and then wrinkles her nose in that way males like, and Mowgli’s legs turn to rubber bands; he leaves his jungle chums with scarcely a backward look and staggers up the path to the village. The homemaker nailed him almost without trying, just for practice, perhaps.
The same look occurs in The Lion King when Nala rediscovers Simba in exile; they’re rolling around, innocently fighting; Nala pins him and licks the side of his face – but far from childishly. Then, it’s The Look. It’s amazingly direct: heart to heart, with nothing in the way. Then the eyes narrow, with a sort of calculation perhaps, or maybe just to focus the stream of her attentions, and Simba is blown away as if by an irresistible wind; oh, he’s long gone, he’s had it.
In Aladdin, Princess Jasmine’s tiny waist is extraordinarily enticing to evil Jafar – perhaps for the reason that there’s nothing on it. For reasons we needn’t go into, she pretends to fall in love with him. As she walks towards him, a veil falls from her body like gliding water. Her voice is low and full of promise as she calls his name and advances on him, a woman confirmed in the dark certainty of her power. The horrible old man drools obscenely. And so, I fear, do I.
The Look, in all its scandalous detail, is a relatively recent Disney phenomenon. But the next time you watch Snow White be prepared for a scene of Rabelaisian ripeness. The heroine is stretched out across seven beds; she is lying in the way languorous 1930s leading ladies did after being rogered senseless in the afternoon. As she wakes, she stretches and exposes her wrists to us (phwaoah!). The dwarfs, hiding behind the headboards, put up their heads one by one and their noses, their noses, pop up and hang over the headboard one by one, like seven oddly shaped and rather repulsive phalluses.
If you say this analysis is the product of a filthy mind, I won’t argue the point – but it doesn’t make the analysis wrong.
There was a time when I felt it necessary to say something sensible about sex to Hugo, as he was sixteen and at a delicate stage. We were alone in the car, having just been watching the video of The Rocky Horror Picture Show at Jose’s house. ‘And what he did with Janet!’ Hugo laughed.
‘Well, and with Brad.’ And then I said, without really thinking, ‘I wouldn’t worry about that, Hugo. It’s the sort of thing most men do, at one time or another, if only to see what it’s like.’
There was a fractional pause. ‘You?’ he asked lightly.
‘Oh, sure,’ I answered, casually. ‘As I say, it’s the sort of thing most men do.’
That’s not a conversation you can have if you’re married, incidentally. But that was a useful thing – perhaps the only consciously useful thing I said to him on the subject.
In the middle of his seventh year Al
exander said, rather out of the blue, ‘When I grow up I’m going to be gay.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yup. I’m going to be a gay.’
‘Do you know what a gay is?’
‘Nope!’ he said, rather pleased with himself. ‘Don’t you think you should find out before you make it your ambition?’
‘Nope! I’m going to be a gay!’
Whether or not that turns out to be the case, there have been incidents to the contrary. He’s had a number of girlfriends and several other girls who have caused him pain. There have been girls whom he’d share beds with. Girls with whom he’d go off into the bushes and explore the secrets of the universe. Girls with whom he’d look up horrible things on the Internet. ‘Simon, should we be worried?’ asked an English father. ‘Alexander and [my daughter] have been investigating the Internet and they’ve seen a man having his cock sucked.’
‘Hm,’ I went, thinking of the pictures you can get on the Net, some pretty gruesome, but still pictures and therefore not particularly real. ‘Well, I think that would be more of a problem for [your daughter]. I can imagine her feeling violated, but I think Alexander would find it comic.’
‘Mm,’ he mumbled. ‘The thing is, it was a man sucking the cock.’
‘Ah.’ I didn’t know what to say to that. ‘Aha!’
Should we interpret it for the children? It’s a modern form of doctors and nurses. Except all the nurses are male. And take each other’s temperature in an unorthodox way. Or should we ignore it? As it happened, the incident slipped my mind that evening, so it turned out that I ignored it.
A year later I asked Alexander about that moment on the Internet. He remembered it and laughed suddenly. ‘It was really fanny, there was this woman with her boobs squishing against the screen! And there was a man pressing his butt against the screen. But not so you could see the crack or anything.’