Good Sex Illustrated Read Online Free PDF Page B

manufactured for his use—knowledge meaning, in this case, distance. Approach/avoidance: that is the very paradox of sex education.
    As soon as the information ceases to be propagandist, economic and cultural frameworks restrict a large part of the access to it. The less reactionary it is, the less it becomes available as merchandise; you need to be cultured to understand it, persistent (“obsessed,” in fact) to find it and “deviant” to criticize its weaknesses.
    Here, as everywhere, information about it is distributed selectively; and the incapacity to judge it that results within the poorly informed silent majority is dubbed “freedom of opinion.” The average citizen randomly manufactures his sexuality for himself with shreds of knowledge, the traumas of childhood, instinctual vestiges more or less well resewn together, and a neurotic selection of family taboos. Obliged to subject his sex life to social pressures that run contrary to it, he usually discovers only one solution: making a clean sweep, castration. Adult desire, whether it’s “normal” or “perverted,” has a mode of residual survival that is determined by a misunderstood and unnoticed exterior order. The search for a state of equilibrium in the context of desire, for the least suffering, the least frustration and a minimum of ostracization (either in relation to the behavior of the majority, or in relation to the codes of a “deviant” subculture) produces a sexuality that timorously obeys received patterns and aggressively imposes them on others. You have to respect the order so that it will respect you; and fight thosewho flout this great principle, or they could actually destroy the prison that protects you, steal the sexual rewards that you’ve learned how to obtain, depreciate the actions in which you’ve invested your libidinal capital in order to protect a fragment of it and sleep better at night.
    The sex education of minors is accountable to the same process. Such cases begin with misappropriation, the deprivation of speech and corporality. We speak about sex to children and adolescents after having denied them all rights to sexuality. This “stolen sexuality” is restored to the minor in the form of a prescriptive and theoretical discourse. Sex as reinvented by this educational-scientific speech will play the same role as programming does in relation to an electronic device: it will dictate to the psyche the impulses and behaviors that exploitive society requires of us.
    From then on, the minor will hear the voice of governmental sexology, he will be the spectator of another’s sexuality, he will be the voyeur of parental erotism. He will remain without a sex, because society will only grant him one after fifteen to twenty years of brainwashing that only systematic frustration can render effective.
    The child deprived of all social autonomy, of all spontaneous relationship to others, impaired, submissive, made to fall back on a father, a mother, the idiot box and a school that alienates, is given an “initiation” that informs him of the sexuality of big people and censors or ridicules his own eroticism. He is repeatedly told that desire is procreation, that prepubescence is impotence, that the practice of sex absolutely requires the possession of “operational” sex organs that allow intercourse between adults and impregnation. His urges are carefully socialized, he is “oedipalized,” or, in other words, forced into a closed circuit of sexual economy that simultaneously harnesses his desire and prohibits it; and his mind is madeto retrain desire into aggression, the search for pleasure into the acquisition of power, and erotic pleasure into owning objects.
    The teenager—who is “free” to fool around a bit (if he is a bold and good-looking fellow) and to masturbate at night (if his family doesn’t frequent too many priests)—is inflicted with an indoctrination designed to render plausible the prohibitions to which