Butterfly Kisses: Researching Female Pedophilia

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Sexual Revolution and the Liberation of Children: An Interview With Kate Millett By Mark Blasius

Mark Blasius: How would you envision a sexually free society? Do you think any limitations should be placed upon a sexual revolution, and what role would cross-generational sex play in a sexual revolution?

Kate Millett: A sexual revolution begins with the emancipation of women, who are the chief victims of patriarchy, and also with ending of homosexual oppression. Part of the patriarchal family structure involves the control of the sexual life of children; indeed, the control of children totally. Children have virtually no rights guaranteed by law in our society and besides, they have no money which, in a money economy, is one of the most important sources of their oppression. Certainly, one of children's essential rights is to express themselves sexually, probably primarily with each other but with adults as well. So the sexual freedom of children is an important part of a sexual revolution. How do we bring this about? The problem here is that when you have an exploitative situation between adults and children as you have between men and women, cross-generational relationships take place in a situation of inequality. Children are in a very precarious position when they enter into relationships with adults, not only in a concrete material sense but emotionally as well, because their personhood is not acknowledged in our society.

Do you think that a tender loving erotic relationship can exist between a boy and a man?

Of course, or between a female child and an older woman. Men and women have loved each other for millennia, as have people of different races. What I'm concerned about is the iniquitous context within which these relationships must exist. Of course, these relationships can be non-exploitative and, considering the circumstances, they are probably heroic and very wonderful; but we have to admit that they can be exploitative as well - like in the prostitution of youth.

Don't you think that age-of-consent laws are barriers to exploring possibilities for non-exploitative crossgenerational relationships and, more importantly, serve to further deny the right of youths to sexual expression?

Well, they were originally meant to protect the child from exploitation. But what's interesting is that the right to child sexuality is not being approached initially as the right of children to express themselves with each other, which was the issue in the '30s with the early sexual liberationists. Instead, it's being approached as the right of men to have sex with kids below the age of consent and no mention is made of relationships between women and girls. It seems as though the principal spokespeople are older men and not youths.

That's probably because children or youths have no political voice. But most gay male youth groups seem to support lowering or abolition of the age of consent as a first step. How prevalent are erotic relationships between women and girls, do you think?

In general, women are given more freedom than men within patriarchy to love across generations. But I don't see the correlative of man/boy relationship existing in lesbian culture as I know it. There's a lot of cross-generational contact among lesbians and even heterosexual women -for example between older and young women artists - but they're mainly as friendships or as mentor relationships. And cross-generational sexual relationships are more of a topic within the male homosexual movement than the female homosexual movement and women in the movement often condemn its advocates. As women, we're probably, more protective of children. Also, having been exploited, we're more sensitive to the possibility of exploitation - we've been minors all of our history. We're more sexually repressed than men, having been given a much more strict puritanical code of behavior than men ever have. Men engage in sexual activities that women often regard as promiscuous - it's as though men don't have the defenses that women have against mutual exploitation - against sexual use to the degree of abuse. So as women, we've experienced a great deal of sexual repression; at the same time, we're less exploitative. It's possible also that the condition of lesbians has been so repressive that it prevents them from seeing female people below the age of consent as sexual partners. There's still, I think, a holding back among lesbians from converting that Platonic mentor relationship across generations into an erotic one because of the enormous and potentially catastrophic complications involved in doing so. Catastrophic not only in the personal sense but also in terms of the persecution inflicted by the outside world.

The dialog about these issues within the lesbian and homosexual male movements raises very interesting issues. Have you thought about incest as an issue too? I've always wondered about the power of the incest taboo because, as child and adult sexuality reaches out to greater and greater freedoms, the proximity of family members makes one experiment and challenge this taboo. The incest taboo has always been one of the cornerstones of patriarchal thought.

We have to have an emancipation proclamation for children. What is really at issue is children's rights and not, as it has been formulated up to now, merely the right of sexual access to children.

But shouldn't one of the rights of children be that of choosing to have an erotic relationship with an older person?

Oh sure, part of a free society would be that you could choose whomever you fancied, and children should be able to freely choose as well. But it's very hard to be free if you have no rights about anything, if you're: subjected to endless violence - both physical and psychological, if you're not permitted to speak, if you have no money, if you're already governed by a whole state system whether you want to be there or not. I would think that, given the conditions under which you're a young person in this society, many things would be at least as important to you as your sexuality.

It strikes me that there is a contradiction in supporting children's liberation while maintaining paternalistic age-of-consent laws and stigmatizing adults who have erotic relations with young people.

If you don't change the social condition of children you still have an inescapable inequality. That's like the story of the 1917 revolution. Men and women were declared equal one morning and everybody could divorce each other by postcard. It's just that the women had the babies and getting divorced by postcard when you've been given no means to earn a living and no education and you're in an enormously inferior economic situation meant that you were only being declared equal while not being given the substance of equality.

I can see how gay youth groups would be very interested in abolishing the age-of-consent law because it must he very oppressive for them. But it just seems to me that this has been mainly an issue for older men rather than for gay youth.

The rhetoric of pedophilia-that of older men speaking out for the sexual freedom of boys-reflects the underlying powerlessness of children. One could say that it is symptomatic of this powerlessness. Boy lovers are directly and acutely cognizant of the social and economic conditions which crush kids. But it is these same conditions which prevent kids both from having a real political visibility and from acting on their own behalf.

But what is our freedom fight about? Is it about the liberation of children or just having sex with them? I would like to see a broader movement involving young people who would be making the decisions because it's their issue and their fight. Theirs is the authentic voice.


Editors' Note:

Kate Millett wrote Sexual Politics, Prostitution Papers, Flying, Sita, and most recently, The Basement. Mark Blasius teaches politics at Princelon. This interview, untitled, first appeared in 'Eoving Boys, " Serniotext(e) Special, Intervention Series #2, Summer 1980. Reprinted with permission. Copyright 0 Semiotext(e) Inc., 1980. It also appeared in Daniel Tsang (Ed), The Age Taboo: Gay Male Sexuality, Power and Consent (Boston: Alyson Publications, 1981).

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Interview: Inge
Uncertainty and Manipulation Can Occur in Any Relationship

Sjuul Deckwitz interviewed Inge, a 18-year-old high-school student who, after high-school graduation, wants to go abroad for a year and then do Dutch studies at university. She lives with her father, but leads an independent life. Her parents are divorced and she has a good relationship with her mother and brother. When she was 16 she fell in love with Martina, then 32, a teacher in her school. Their relationship lasted two years, although the relationship only became sexual during the second year. According to Inge the age difference was a contributing, but not the primary, cause for their break-up.


Inge: When I was twelve and in the sixth grade, I fell in love with “Ellen,” an older woman, my gym teacher. I don't know exactly how old she was, but in any case she was much older than I. During gym class I was really scared of blundering, and I hardly dared to look at her. Perhaps that's why I can't quite remember her face. I have retained more the image of her charisma. She was a very athletic and self-confident woman. I simply didn't think about the age difference.

I was brought up in a very liberal environment. It was quite normal to discuss and assert your feelings and desires in my family. I didn't have to hide them from my parents, or friends. I discussed my infatuation quite frankly with my mother, but mentioned it only in passing to my dad.

I finally decided to write my gym teacher a letter. In the end I didn't send it, though I did keep it.

Dear Ellen: It's very hard for me to write about this, but I'll do it anyway. For a long time I felt I've been in love with you. I have spent hours thinking about how to tell you this. Eventually I decided to tell you in a letter. I have discussed this with many people, but now I would like to know how you feel about it. Could you write me back about this? I would very much like an answer.

Soon after I entered junior high school, on an impulse, I wrote a little article for the school paper about my crush on the gym teacher. I wanted to know how other kids were reacting.

Being in love! I myself was in love with a teacher. It was my first time. It's great to be in love, but it can also be difficult. When I was in love I told my mother and two girlfriends — that it was with a woman, and I am a girl. They encouraged me to tell my teacher. After thinking it over for a long time, I decided to write her a letter. After wavering for a long time I decided, however, not to send it.

In the last week of sixth grade I finally decided I had to tell her.

She came into our classroom to ask our teacher about something or other and left again right away. I saw her and thought, “This is my last chance. I have to tell her.” I ran after her and asked her if she had a moment to spare. I started to tremble, my cheeks flushed, and I got all tearful. I stumbled over my words. She asked me whether I felt relieved, and some other things, but I can't remember now what they were. Then it was all over. I went back to my class, my cheeks still tear—stained, and went on with my lessons. I would like to hear or read more stories like mine: whether other people told the one they were in love with, whether they also fell in love with somebody their own sex, how the people they told about it reacted. I'm really curious.

Fortunately for me my girlfriends from my primary-school days kept it a secret. The word got around, nonetheless, that I was the one who had written the article. They really pestered me about it. They had always thought I was odd because I had rather feminist ideas; I was more progressive than most of the others, and I didn't wear all the latest things popular with the kids. They really teased me. Little by little they started to forget, but I never really felt comfortable there. After three years I transferred to another school. When I was in high school I realized for the first time how strange people thought homosexuality was.

At the new school I met a girl who was preparing a paper about homosexuality in the United States. I felt I could confide in her, and told her what had happened at my previous school. She asked me if I wanted to go out with her to a women's disco, the Labyrinth. It was the last night it was going to be open before they closed down for good. There was a huge, last-night party. I liked it there, I felt at ease. My friend told me she expected Martina, a teacher at our high school, to be there later, and from that moment on I was on pins and needles. Would she come? Wouldn't she? I had seen her around school and run into her a few times but I hadn't realized that I was already in love with her. Finally she arrived and right away, WHAM! It seemed to be love at first sight, but these feelings had already been brewing unconsciously in me. Right there, in the thick of all the party hubbub, we talked all night.

Martina was 32 years old, I was 16. Although we were in love, she didn't want a sexual relationship with me. She was very clear about this. As long as she was teaching at our school, nothing could happen between us. If the two of us were going to enter into a relationship, she wanted to be open about it. She didn't have a permanent position, and she worried that people at the school would have trouble with her homosexuality. She didn't cherish being branded a paedophile either; a lesbian with a young partner would be doubly odd and doubly negative. We went out sometimes to a bar or a restaurant, but more often we stayed at her place, sitting at opposite ends of the couch, longing for one another. I remember thinking, “I want to, I want to.” It was all very hard, but exciting at the same time. I thought she was very beautiful, and because she was a teacher I put her on a pedestal. We could talk so well together, about feminism for instance, or politics, or being a lesbian. She taught me how to reason, and through our conversations I began to understand how society was structured, something I had never realized before.

Her refusal to have a relationship was hard for me, but I trusted her saying it was impossible for her. I wanted to be as close to her as possible and was afraid of losing her by making the mistake of pressuring her into anything. This lasted for about a year, but then she got another job. If she hadn't changed jobs I might have become more insistent.

She phoned me one day not long afterwards, and we had this very intense discussion on the phone. I was floored. I hadn't expected things to ever change between us. I really had to catch my breath. We arranged a date. We were both very much in love, and there was no longer any reason to deny ourselves. Our relationship really began when we started to make love.

My parents didn't mind that I now had this full-blown relationship with a woman, and a much older woman at that. They were pleased for me, and showed interest in its development. My brother was fairly quick to accept it, though at first he had some difficulties with the fact that I am a lesbian. Most of my friends reacted positively, but I felt I still had to hide it from my other acquaintances whom I knew simply would never understand it. At school I only told a few girlfriends I trusted. I didn't have the nerve to walk hand in hand with her in the streets. Perhaps, with someone my own age, it wouldn't have bothered me.

When we went shopping, people sometimes thought we were cousins. Once, when we were in a women's bookshop, somebody asked us whether we attended the same school. Sure, the two of us thought, but not the way you think!

We met three times a week and I slept over at Martina's. We spent almost the whole weekend together. I was terribly in love, completely focussed on her. My friends complained that they could never reach me at home, but they understood that I was simply in love.

Right from the beginning, Martina said that she knew how it was going to end. When you get into a relationship at an early age there will always come a time when you start looking for someone else. I heard her saying it, but I didn't really take it in. I was too much in love.

There certainly were problems. I was living with my father and there was this third person to deal with, so there was less privacy. Martina and my dad got along very well and we tried sleeping together at my place. The three of us ate dinner together too, but this didn't really work, and we ended up mostly at Martina's.

You have to remember that I was still at school, living at home, and had little of my own money to spend. We didn't share all the same tastes either. We both enjoyed the theater and the movies, but Martina preferred dances for women over thirty. We saw a lot more of Martina's friends than of mine, and I didn't make my own friends at those dances. I didn't know the music and just stood around feeling self-conscious. Sometimes I got drawn into conversations that went over my head simply because those women lived in a different world. They talked about their jobs, literature, or politics, and sometimes used expressions I didn't understand. At moments like that I didn't feel I could ask what they meant.

Her friends were kind to me, maybe unconsciously a little condescending: whenever they talked with me they always asked me about school. That really made me feel different, so young. I realized that I wanted to be more in touch with my peers, that I wanted to fool around and just have some good old fashioned fan. Sometimes I went to the girls' group, for the under 26, at the local gay and lesbian center.

Martana was too old to join me there, but I did take her along to parties. I was proud to show her off. But I felt so terribly responsible; I always watched carefully to see if she was having a good time. On several occasions we talked about my not seeing enough of my girlfriends. Sometimes I felt our relationship cramped my style. I wanted to feel free; to flirt; to have one night stands; to try out everything. It all had to do with being young.

After the relationship had ended, Martina said that we should have spent more time at my place, in my world. She also said that it would have made a big difference if I had been living on my own because I hadn't liked it when she had had to pay for me. Of course I had sometimes paid for myself, but whenever we did something expensive, she paid. It's great to go the theater, but I also thought: why not skip this time, it's so expensive, and then on the other hand I thought: why not make use of the money that's available? I offered to pay her something monthly to help cover my share of the expenses, but she didn't want me to. She always paid for the groceries. Ironically, she told me that she should have paid more often for me. She thought I spent too much money on the two of us. Martina was very much aware of my situation, because she herself had had a relationship with an older woman when she was young.

Sexually, I didn't experience the age difference. I had already had sexual experiences with girls my own age and knew what I liked and didn't like. When I was about 13 years old, I had a girl friend who was, just like me, preoccupied with sex. We bought porn and cut up old pantyhose into erotic lingerie. When you can't afford to buy that stuff you've got to do it yourself. I experimented with her and other girls. I even practiced kissing because I was afraid that I wouldn't be good at it. I had read somewhere that you should practice on your hand. I practiced every night. When it came to sex I was pretty well prepared, though I think that with every new relationship you have to start all over again. You always feel a bit insecure at first. When someone is ready for sex they look for it. It's probably better if they have some kind of a basis, experience with their peers. That way they can find out what they want. Most kids know very well what they want. When it comes to sex, they sense when something is not quite right. They'll withdraw. Certainly, kids in relationships with older persons, and who are not yet so sure of themselves, can be manipulated. But uncertainty and manipulation can be a part of any relationship.

At present I have a relationship with a woman eight years older than I, so there isn't that much of an age gap. Maybe, as I grow older, I'll take more and more to people my own age. I do notice that she's younger than Martina. We like the same kinds of entertainment; it's just great, having fin and making love. I think equality is very important; to listen to each other, to help one another, to appreciate each other. But I can still imagine myself in a relationship with somebody in their thirties or forties. I haven't yet fallen in love with somebody my own age. You can never know, it could happen any time.

My mother asked me once why I didn't look for somebody my own age. I took it as a criticism, as if she were warning me that I made it too hard for myself. She didn't want to see me hurt, especially because of differences in age. Now I realize I can have very satisfying conversations with my peers. I also really like to live it up.

The age difference wasn't the primary cause of our splitting up, though I'd have to say it did contribute to it. My being all wrapped up in her life finally began to bother me, and all of a sudden I put an end to our relationship. It seemed sudden of course, but I had been nursing these feelings for some time, and she had felt it coming.

When I look around me I notice that age differences are pretty common in the lesbian world. I don't want to label something, “the lesbian world,” as if it were as a place where these relationships happen a lot, but girls look up to an older woman as an example, and the older woman helps the girl's coming out. If I could relive my relationship with Martina, I wouldn't hesitate for one second. I look back on it now with great pleasure.

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The World of Girls' Schools: The History of Girls' School Stories
by Ju Gosling

If indeed the gentle, grey-robed nuns who long, long ago had stolen silently along those very stairs could have come back to survey the scene of their former activities, I fear on this particular occasion they would have wrung their slim, transparent hands in horror over the stalwart modern maidens who had succeeded them in possession of the ancient, rambling house. No pale-faced novices these, with downcast eyes and cheeks sunken with fasting; no timid glances, no soft ethereal footfalls or gliding garments - the old order had changed indeed, and yielded place to a rosy, racy, healthy, hearty, well-grown set of twentieth-century schoolgirls, overflowing with vigorous young life and abounding spirits, mentally and physically fit, and about as different from their mediaeval forerunners as a hockey stick is from a spindle.

(Angela Brazil, The School by the Sea, Blackie & Son, 1914, pp10-11)

The genre of girls' school stories arose in parallel with the provision of secondary education for British girls, from the late nineteenth century onwards. At the beginning of the twentieth century, less than a quarter of all British girls aged between twelve and eighteen attended any kind of school, but by 1920 the number receiving a secondary education had risen from 20,000 in 1897 to 185,000. Similarly, while the fundamental elements of the genre can be discerned in stories published in the latter part of the nineteenth century, it was only in the first quarter of the twentieth century that the genre of girls' school stories became established and the most popular form of reading for British girls.

In the nineteenth century, while education was seen as a passport to success in professional and public life for Victorian middle-class boys, who were educated "for the world", middle-class girls were educated "for the drawing room" and their education was social rather than intellectual. As a result, the majority of upper- and upper-middle-class girls were educated at home, with only a minority attending expensive, fashionable boarding schools with a non-academic curriculum. Meanwhile the daughters of the professional and the merchant classes were educated at home until they were about ten years old, after which they attended a local day school for two or three years, generally followed by a boarding school which provided a social rather than an academic education. Lower-middle-class girls attended small, local day schools for about four or five years from around the age of ten, and their levels of achievement were particularly low.

For the majority of upper- and middle-class girls, this pattern continued until as late as the beginning of the First World War. But in 1850 Frances Mary Buss established the North London Collegiate School, the first of the modern fee-paying day schools or High Schools, offering a similar education to that given to boys; in 1869 the Endowed Schools Act increased girls' access to grammar schools, which had previously been almost exclusively male; in 1872 Emily Shirreff and her sister Maria Grey founded the Girls' Public Day School Company, enabling schools to be owned by trusts or companies and controlled by a board of governors rather than by private individuals; and in 1877 the first girls' public school, St Andrew's, opened in Scotland, followed by Roedean in 1885 and Wycombe Abbey in 1896.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, increasing numbers of middle-class British girls were attending school, fuelled by the growing preference of women to teach in schools rather than in private families. Girls studied a curriculum similar to that which was provided in boys' schools, with the emphasis on academic attainment and sport rather than domestic roles. (It should be stressed, though, that girls' ultimate destination in life was still taken to be that of wife and mother, now educated to be a "companion" to her husband and better able to mother her children.) Many more schools for middle-class girls opened in the first quarter of the twentieth century, including St Felix in Southwold and Benenden; these were inevitably single-sex and owned privately or by the Girls' Public Day School trust, and many were boarding schools, fuelled by the demands of an Empire which meant that large numbers of middle-class British parents were based overseas.

Working-class British girls, though, had to wait longer for equal access to education. During the early Victorian period, the majority of working-class girls attended dame schools, charity schools or state-aided voluntary or industrial schools, leaving at about eleven years old when they could enter employment. While at school they followed a restricted curriculum, comprising reading, religious education and some writing, and there is evidence to suggest that both their access to education and the curriculum which they studied was markedly poorer than that of working-class boys. The 1870 Education Act, which established the state-organised elementary schools, formalised the differences between boys' education and girls' with a sex-specific curriculum, with the aim of girls' education being seen as preparing them for domestic life, both in their own homes and in the service of others.

Then, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the 1902 Education Act introduced radical changes to the organisation and administration of the state-organised schools which working-class pupils attended. School boards were abolished, and local authorities were empowered to become education authorities; to administer the elementary schools; and to found and run secondary schools. However, the education which was provided was still gender-specific and inferior to that which was given to upper- and middle-class pupils. Also, while the secondary schools provided a more academic curriculum, they charged fees. Since scholarship places, which were introduced in 1907, were limited, access for working-class girls was severely restricted. Similarly, the age at which pupils could legally leave school was set at twelve years old in 1899, with fourteen made compulsory only in 1918, meaning that the length of working-class girls' educational careers was considerably shorter than that of middle-class girls. It was only with the 1944 Education Act, which introduced free secondary education for all and raised the school leaving age to fifteen, that the majority of working class girls began to achieve greater equality of opportunity.

The early schoolgirls' lives revolved around their school experiences, reinforced by a society which treated middle-class girls as children until they left school at seventeen or eighteen years old. In general, it was a world without boys and adults. Sally Mitchell records that, during the last two decades of the nineteenth century: "both working-class and middle-class girls increasingly occupied a separate culture."

The new girl - no longer a child, not yet a (sexual) adult - occupied a provisional free space. Girls' culture suggested new ways of being, new modes of behaviour, and new attitudes that were not yet acceptable for adult women (except in the case of the advance few).

While girls' own lives varied widely, fiction provided them with a common imaginary world. Mitchell claims that: "whether they were at work, at home, or at school, girls could be defined through their shared stories, feelings, interest, self-image, language, and values."
Many of those stories were set in girls' schools, where girls' feelings, interests, language and values were reflected along with the schoolgirl image, characterised by the gym tunic which had become the uniform dress and which symbolised the separate identity of the schoolgirl. This image signified a revolution in British girls' lives. Mitchell describes:

the turn-of-the-century girl's dramatic liberation when she first dressed in a costume distinctively her own, which marked her as neither child nor woman, had pockets, made it possible to run and climb, and let her add a boy-style shirt and tie.

Along with their own costume, girls now had their own literature, which focused, not on their lives as daughters and future wives and mothers, but on their often heroic activities in an all-female world which could lead on to university and a career, with their school being central both to the stories and to the characters' lives. As Rosemary Auchmuty points out:

School stories were literary proof that (middle-class) girls' education was at last being taken seriously and that (middle-class) girls should have access to a masculine curriculum, including games, and a masculine value-system, perceived in a patriarchal society as the best available. This in itself was a source of pride for schoolgirls. A still greater source of strength and pleasure was, no doubt, the fact of studying, playing, and learning to live together in a community of girls and women, free from the constant patronage, harrassment and competition of the male sex.

Margaret Simey, who was born in 1906 and became a pupil at St Paul's girls' public school in London, recalls that:

School as a great institution was a right thrill, we'd never experienced it. Our brothers had gone to school, that kind of school, but women hadn't. And of course, in those days, I keep telling people, I remember what it was like not to have a vote. And in that atmosphere, where the boys were everything, you went to this school where it was an entire world of women. And these books, Angela Brazil and that were all about our private world, it was our world. (archived interview, 1990)

However, from the beginning the genre did not appeal only to girls who were receiving a middle-class girls' education such as Simey's, but also to those educated at home and from lower-middle-class and working-class backgrounds. There were initially far more readers of school stories than there were British girls receiving secondary education, and many girls encountered the genre before the experience of school itself. It was not simply the representation of readers' own lives, then, which appealed to them about girls' school stories.

The genre of girls' school stories is generally believed to have developed in imitation of the boys' books, of which the first is generally taken to be Tom Brown's Schooldays, published in 1857. In fact, however, the earliest known boarding school story is a girls' school story, Sarah Fielding's The Governess: or, Little Female Academy which was published in 1749. Between then and the publication of Tom Brown's Schooldays, at least 87 other English school stories were published, containing most of the characteristics which would distinguish the genre in the second half of the nineteenth century.

In the mid-1850s, the growth of the children's book market in Britain was paralleled by the development of a style of writing for children where, as Judith Rowbotham describes:

the intention was to give an illusion of reality through the setting of the story in order . . . to coat the powder of the moral in the jam of a good narrative. In order to increase both realism and digestibility, these stories were carefully aimed at specific age, class and gender targets. . . most authors . . . claimed to write stories that would act as guides, influencing children in the ways in which they should think and act for the rest of their lives.

This perspective on the purpose of British children's literature was to remain dominant. However, since "realism" was becoming the world of the school as well as the home for girls, women began to write more stories set in schools.

In general, the growth of the children's book market had beneficial effects for girls and women. Rowbotham points out that:

the creation of a body of fiction concentrating specifically on an adolescent middle-class female market actually aided the expansion of women's role in society. It gave a considerable boost to the profession of author, markedly increasing the number of women writers.

Between 1870, when the Education Act became law, and 1880, when compulsory education was introduced in Britain, there was then a rapid expansion in children's book publishing. Kimberley Reynolds records that:

By the 1880s, the range of fictional books alone included adventure stories, historical fiction, school stories, and domestic stories . . . Among those producing books for girls by this time were Mrs Ewing, Anne Beale, L.T. Meade, Anna Sewell and Charlotte M. Yonge. Not all of these writers or their works were new, but through cheap reprints, lending libraries and periodical serialisation their works became accessible to the masses, making it possible to see the commercial and ideological potential of juvenile fiction as popular entertainment.

The "lesson" inherent in nineteenth-century girls' school stories, though, was still the desirability of traditional constructs of femininity. For example, Meade set many of her stories in boarding establishments for teenage girls and girls' colleges, with titles including A Sweet Girl Graduate (1891) and Betty: A School Girl (1895), but, as Reynolds points out: "it becomes evident that her books are consistently structured so as to underline traditional images of femininity and to undermine the attractions of changes to women's roles."

Through an inversion of genius, the school setting which had seemed so threatening is, in this new off-shoot of girls' fiction, turned upon itself and made the means of new and greater opportunities for self-denial, service and adherence to the established principles of femininity. At the same time, the works subtly instill a model and code of internal self-regulation which had to replace the old, external parental and social controls once girls no longer received their educations and preparation for the world solely at home.

Girls' books, too, had already been assigned the low status that would continue to mark them throughout the next century. Reynolds records that:

By 1880 . . . girls' books are coming to be seen as those which boys will not read, an important step towards classifying them as works of lower status and so of attributing to girls the need for an inferior literature.

But Mitchell stresses that, at the same time, the new genre of the school story created:

a community where the important rules are the children's own ethics and mores. The new girl's popular fiction emphasises peer standards, not adult standards - that is surely one reason adults came to ignore or despise it. Meade, for example, ranks courage higher than obedience. And more than anything else, her school stories value cohesion, formation of a group, loyalty, and care of girls for one another.

The genre was to contain similarly contradictory messages throughout the next century, and this was to be a key reason for its attracting criticism, since both sets of messages had their opponents.

By the end of the nineteenth century, though, the content of girls' school stories had begun to change. Rowbotham points out that:

during the last decade of the century fiction began to reflect the growing acceptance of girls' schools that deliberately aimed to parallel more closely in organization and administration the long-established and successful boys' institutions. It is probable that in this respect didactic fiction was reflecting a trend that was more acceptable to the pupils than to many conventional middle-class parents. . .

However . . . there was no fundamental change in majority attitudes towards the essentials of feminine education. . .

Education remained for the majority of girls simply the way to character improvement.

Despite these caveats, the fact that some middle-class schoolgirls, both real and fictional, now had access to a very similar type of schooling to that of their brothers signified a revolution in the status of and opportunities open to girls. Mitchell records that:

By the 1890s, stories often used a high school setting and made the conflict between home and school explicit. These high school stories are more overtly feminist than a lot of girls' fiction, though the feminism may be diluted in overlapping layers of tale and interpretation.

Of the plots of turn-of-the-century high school stories, including "Mrs Henry Clarke" 's A Clever Daughter (1896), Geraldine Mockler's The Four Miss Whittingtons (1899), and Elinor D. Adams' A Queen Among Girls (1900), Mitchell writes that:

day schools encourage a girl to accept family responsibility and learn domestic skills while she gains the education to become a self-supporting and responsible woman. At the psychological level - as light reading - they supply the fantasy that one can have it all: parental love and true womanliness without giving up ambition, success, and new-woman independence.

After 1900, the genre also began to feature boarding schools modelled on boys' public schools, such as Jessie Mansergh's Tom and Some Other Girls: A Public School Story (1901). Other authors now writing in the genre included May Baldwin, Dorothea Moore, Lilian F. Wevill, Mrs George de Horne Vaizey and Helen Watson.


The growth of the popularity of the genre at the beginning of the twentieth century was related to the fact that girls, unlike boys, were encouraged to read, and it was popularly supposed to help to develop their character. Reynolds records that:

Girls had more leisure at the end of the century than boys and fewer ways of filling it. This was true even of working-class girls, for the worsening economic situation both resulted in fewer opportunities for work and led to social pressures which gave rise to a widespread retreat into the home. In marked contrast to boys' reading, the reading of fiction was regarded as a suitable pastime for young women, as long as what they read was not considered to be challenging or corrupting in any way. Moreover, unlike boys, girls were often encouraged to read and study literature at school.

Reynolds adds that:

just as their abilities and areas of study tended to be dismissed as inferior to those of boys, so what they read was regarded as frivolous and classed as low-status, popular fiction. So it is that the largest area within juvenile publishing, books written specifically for girls, and the largest and most avid group of readers, girls (a term which in late-Victorian and Edwardian England could encompass an age range the upper limit of which was twenty-five) were constantly ridiculed by teachers, critics and journalists, and their authors discredited, at least in terms of literary standing.

This attitude was to remain unchallenged for much of the twentieth century (see 7. The Critics of Girls' School Stories and 8. The Parodies of Girls' School Stories for details).

Then, in 1906, the publication of Angela Brazil's The Fortunes of Phillipa rejuvenated the genre and signalled the beginning of its mass popularity. Mary Cadogan and Patricia Craig point out that: "Angela Brazil's first school story struck at once an optimistic note; The Fortunes of Phillipa could not have failed to be popular, when so many Victorian heroines had been characterized solely by their misfortunes."

Angela Brazil broke deliberately with tradition, by expressing the girls' attitudes from the inside. Instead of boring her readers with a long-winded narrative view of events, she adopted as far as possible their vocabulary and their viewpoint, to achieve a zest and immediacy which the Edwardian schoolgirl must have relished. Her girls can be ruthless, stupid, vain or pig-headed without incurring overt narrative disapproval; the issue is rather the girls' tolerance of one another, than the author's concern to instruct her readers (though that of course is implicit in the stories' outcome, and occasionally does obtrude).

Shirley Foster and Judy Simons point out that Brazil's use of language was a key reason for the popularity of her stories: "Brazil's slang, considered sufficiently outrageous by contemporary readers for her books to be banned from some schools, effectively creates its own anti-authoritarian code that is distinctively juvenile and female." (This was to continue to be a factor in the popularity of the genre, most notably in Elinor M. Brent-Dyer's Chalet School series, where overt strictures against slang - presumably as a defence against the criticisms which Brazil had faced - obscured the fact that Brent-Dyer created an alternative schoolgirl language, including the use of "fabulous" or "fab" which later entered mainstream discourse.)

Brazil, the first of five authors who can be counted as the major writers in the genre, went on to produce 45 full-length school stories and a number of short stories (these latter were published in annuals) before her death in 1947. These were not only popular in Britain but internationally; Gillian Freeman records that: "Not only Indian girls, but Dutch, French, Polish, German, Scandinavian and American girls were reading Angela's books, the illustrative style changing radically from one country to another." Brazil's stories were characterised by their "realism"; very little happens in Brazil's stories which does not conform to the rules that govern the external world, although, along with the minor authors writing at the time, she does make use of "deus ex machina" in her early sub-plots, restoring missing relatives or lost inheritances.

(Some use of "deus ex machina" was always to characterise the genre, and to be one reason why the genre attracted criticism. Similarly, few of the books are conventionally plotted, with the majority consisting only of a series of loosely connected sub-plots.)

In general, though, Brazil's stories picture girls studying together, organising together and playing together, and their relationships with other girls, often passionate, are of overwhelming importance. Brothers and families are often represented within the stories, many of which are set in day schools, but the school and its girls are shown as being at the centre of characters' lives. The stories also include lengthy descriptions of holiday travels in Britain and abroad which must have appealed to readers, the majority of whom would have had no such experiences themselves. For readers abroad, of course, most of the representations within the stories would have been outside of their experience.

Brazil's reworking of the genre meant that girls' school stories soon became enormously popular, with other authors now including Ethel Talbot and May Wynne. Mitchell records that:

By the first decade of the twentieth century, "Books for Girls" had become a standard category on the lists of British publishers. The genre included school stories and tales of heroic action in the Indian Mutiny or the Boer War, holiday adventures that showed girls on their own in dangerous places, and career books featuring young artists and nurses and typists in detective firms.

School stories were the most popular of all of these. Mitchell points out that, despite Brazil's stress on more "realistic" stories, the school experiences represented still remained fantasy for most of the genre's readers. "It was thus primarily in fiction that school became a privileged space for girls' interactions and ethics."

In 1913, Elsie J. Oxenham's first school story, Rosaly's New School, was published, followed in 1914 by The Girls of the Hamlet Club. This story, set in a Buckinghamshire school where a division existed between the wealthier girls who lived in the town and the poorer girls who lived in the surrounding hamlets, marked the first of the series which was later to become known simply as "The Abbey Girls" after the publication of the book of the same name in 1920. Oxenham was to become known as the second major author writing in the genre, but in contrast to Brazil, representations of schooling itself are largely absent from Oxenham's books, even when the action supposedly takes place within school. Instead, the action revolves around the girls themselves and their leisure organisations, chiefly the Camp Fire movement, the Girl Guides and, centrally, folk dancing. The majority of the Abbey Girls books, in fact, are set away from school, and many of them take place when the "girls" are adults.

Perhaps Oxenham recognised that it was schoolgirl society rather than school itself which was central to readers' enjoyment of the books. Margaret Simey, a member of Oxenham's own Camp Fire group, recalls that:

In those days . . . [St Paul's] was a boys' public school really . . . and it was all directed to examinations, and the peak of my achievement was that my hockey captain was Evelyn Sharp, who was the first woman civil servant to head a department. And that was the life we were directed towards. She wasn't of the tiniest interest to me, and so I sailed through school never even listening to a word. . .

I think what [Oxenham] gave to me was all that school didn't. All that learning Latin and Greek, passing exams and things were no good to me at all. And [the Camp Fire movement], we put all the lights out and we drew the curtains, and you dressed up in your Indian stuff with the head band and everything, and you lit a candle, and you recited verses from Hiawatha. And I can see the contrast, it must have been wonderful. Now I laugh at it. But on the other hand we worked for badges and things, just like Guides. (archived interview, 1990)

In fact, Simey became the first woman to take a social science degree, and later went on to a distinguished career. But her memories show clearly that girls did not want mere representations of their school experiences to entertain them during their leisure time.

However, for most of the genre's authors, school was central to girls' school stories. 1920 saw the publication of Dorita Fairlie Bruce's The Senior Prefect (republished as Dimsie Goes to School), her first full-length story about the Jane Willard Foundation (three short stories previously having appeared in annuals). Bruce quickly established herself as the third major author of the genre. Eva Löfgren records that:

The success with Dimsie Maitland gave rise to the rapid appearance of five sequels to The Senior Prefect in as many years, and a reprint of the first novel as soon as 1923. The concept of a series of full size novels about the schooldays of one particular character, or of the same group of characters, was a fresh one at this time, and one that had hardly been tried in girls' fiction. Dorita Fairlie Bruce is a pioneer in this respect, although Elsie J. Oxenham employs it about the same time.

The secret of the success of the series did not lie in the continuation of the adventures of a single heroine, who was less important in the books than the title suggests, so much as the continuation of the adventures of the group to which the heroine belonged. Following Oxenham and Bruce, the genre then became characterised by series rather than by individual books, with the development of what were effectively sub-genres by different authors. Bruce went on to write two other series, the St Bride's & Maudsley and the Springdale series, as well as two sets of three stories which each starred the same heroine, the Toby books and the Sally books.

Series commonly lasted for six or nine books, but in 1925 the publication of Elinor M. Brent-Dyer's The School at the Chalet marked the beginning of the longest-running series of the genre. The Chalet School series was eventually to encompass 59 books and nearly half a century; the last book in the series, Prefects for the Chalet School, being published posthumously in 1970. Brent-Dyer, who soon became known as the fourth major writer in the genre, created a school which capitalised on the attractions of "abroad" for its readers, set as it was in the Austrian Alps. Wartime meant that Brent-Dyer had to relocate the school, first to the Channel Island of Guernsey and then, after the Nazi occupation, to the Herefordshire countryside where she lived herself. But after a brief period when she moved the school to a Welsh island after the end of the war, she returned the school to an equally exotic location, Switzerland, where it continued to flourish. Brent-Dyer's series was also unusual in that it featured both Anglican and Roman Catholic girl, together with girls and women of different nationalities who were given equal respect to the British, and girls were expected to be trilingual in English, French and German.

The period between the two World Wars marked the height of the popularity of the genre, with other writers including Marjorie Barnard, Nancy Breary, Dora Chapman, Christine Chaundler, E.M. Channon, Alys Chatwyn, E.E. Cowper, Dorothy Dennison, Josephine Elder, Joy Francis, Mary Gervaise, Joan Butler-Joyce, Irene Mossop and Norah Mylrea. By the beginning of the Second World War, though, critical opposition had become more vocal, at the same time as the range of fiction available for children was widening. However, this did not prevent women from continuing to write in the genre, among them Enid Blyton, the most popular British children's writer of the twentieth century. Blyton first began to write school stories in the late 1930s with The Naughtiest Girl in the School, serialised in her children's magazine Sunny Stories before being published in book form in 1940. This was followed by two sequels: The Naughtiest Girl Again (1942) and The Naughtiest Girl is a Monitor (1945). Although very popular, though, these stories were set in a progressive, mixed-gender school and cannot really be considered to be part of the genre. In contrast, Blyton's St Clare's (1941-45) and Malory Towers (1946-1951) series, containing six books each, were archetypal girls' school stories and immediately became enormously popular, remaining in print in the 1990s.

Who were the women who created and sustained the genre? Auchmuty notes that: "as professional writers they were following one of the two traditionally acceptable careers for 'ladies' - teaching being the other - and one which, moreover, was (rather more than teaching) a source of pride rather than embarrassment or resignation." Few came from similar backgrounds to their heroines, though, nor did they have similar experiences of schooling. Brazil, born the daughter of a cotton-mill manager in 1869, attended the most similar types of school - the preparatory department of a Girls' High School and a leading modern girls' day school, Ellerslie - but this was before the modernisation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For example, Brazil later wrote that: "When I go to see modern girls' schools, and know what jolly times they have with games and clubs and acting, I feel that I missed a very great deal." Meanwhile Oxenham, born the daughter of a writer in 1880, spent most of her girlhood in the London suburb of Ealing and attended private schools there. Bruce, who was the daughter of a civil engineer, was born in Spain in 1885 and spent much of her childhood in Scotland, before eventually moving to the London suburb of Ealing where she also attended school.

Brent-Dyer, born the daughter of a ships' surveyor in 1894, grew up in South Shields in a terraced house with no inside toilet or bathroom, and had what she later regarded as being a poor education. Her father left home when she was three, a fact which her mother kept hidden, pretending to be a widow. Blyton was the daughter of a salesman and was born in a flat above a shop in South London in 1897. Soon afterwards her father joined the family "mantle warehousing" company and they moved to a villa in the Kent suburb of Beckenham, where she lived and went to school until she left home to train as a teacher. Blyton's father left the family when she was thirteen, and her mother pretended that her husband was away in order to avoid social stigma. It is not surprising, in the circumstances, that parents are absent from so many school stories.

Löfgren argues that the differences between the school experiences of the writers of girls' school stories and that of their heroines and readers can be explained by the fact that the genre reflects, not the prevailing reality of contemporary girls' schools during the height of popularity of the genre, but rather:

the atmosphere of the pioneering era in the late 19th C. The period between the World Wars is the heyday of the British girls' school story, and it signifies a belated triumph of the pioneers of the reformation of female education, quite independent of the successes and failures of this reformation in real life. This is a modern version of the nostalgia for an Arcadian era. These stories embody the myth of the Great School for Girls.

This reading fits with the actual period in which most of the writers were themselves educated, and is particularly convincing since, for the most part, the writers encountered the myth rather than the reality when schoolgirls themselves.

Likewise Gill Frith argues that: "The school story has always been a dream, a fantasy, has never had more than a tenuous connection with 'real' life." Löfgren points out that:

The "realism" of a formula story is closer to the classical conception of "mimesis" or imitation, in the sense of imitating nature by means of imitating older, model depictions of nature. . . This is how a writer of school stories might create a successful literary world of boarding school only by imitating the worlds of other writers - assisted by her or his own imagination - without any personal experiences from a real school of this kind. . .

Once the genre is established, writers copy each other rather than reality, following and contributing to the expectations of the genre, slowly changing it. . .

No writer in the genre could . . . leave the ever growing line of percursors and colleagues out of consideration - even when deliberately deviating from their models.

From the beginning, then, the world of girls' school stories owed more to myth than to reality, and authors read and used characteristics from each other's work. This self-referencing also functioned to make it clear to readers that the books were part of the genre as a whole, since this was obviously a key motivation for their reading. And, of course, the genre's characteristics developed as characteristics from one author's work became used by other writers and became stock elements of the genre as a whole.

Many of the authors did have teaching experience, though, and of the five main authors, Blyton began her career as a junior teacher and governess; while Brent-Dyer taught for more than thirty years, eventually running her own school. However, Brazil, Bruce and Oxenham did not work outside the home and had to rely on memories, contact with contemporary schoolgirls and their knowledge of the "myth" to create their stories. Brazil defended this perspective, writing that:

I have always had the strong feeling that had I added B.A. to my name, forced myself into a scholastic mould, and become a headmistress, I should never, never, never have written stories about schoolgirls, at any rate not from the schoolgirl's point of view, which is the attitude that has appealed to me most.

This was a period where up to one in four women remained unmarried, and Löfgren notes that:

Of British female children's writers born between 1880 and 1900 less than half the number were expressly said to have been married, compared with about two-thirds of the generation born between 1901 and 1911.

It is interesting to note that Brent-Dyer, Bruce, Brazil and Oxenham never married, while Blyton, who married twice but always used her birth name professionally, presented a facade of happy marriage to her readers while hiding the fact that her first marriage had broken down. Blyton's biographer, Barbara Stoney, and her daughter Imogen Smallwood both describe her as being unfulfilled by domesticity, unable to cook and delegating the responsibility for housework and childcare (although she was able to sew). Much to Imogen's continuing grief, she preferred her imaginary worlds, her fans and a close woman friend to family life, and she avoided close contact with her children. Blyton eventually died in a nursing home in 1968, having lost touch with reality and possibly suffering from Alzheimer's Disease.

Meanwhile Brent-Dyer spent most of her adult life living with her mother and step-father, and after her step-father's death was joined by a succession of women lodgers of her mother's generation; eventually, after her mother's death, moving in with her friends the Matthewmans until her death in 1969. Bruce looked after her parents until they died and her dead brother's children until they grew up, after which she lived with a woman friend from 1949 until her friend died in the early 1960s, then living alone until her own death in 1970. Brazil lived with her brother and sister until her death in 1947; and Oxenham with her sisters after the death of their respective parents, dying herself in 1960.

[RoosterDance]

Were the authors feminists? Certainly Brazil is known to have had suffragette friends. However, there are no records of the five main authors taking part in any political activity, nor evidence of them overtly promoting organised feminism within their books. (Indeed, there are occasional anti-suffragette references in Brazil and Bruce's work.) Rather, with the exception of Blyton, who was clearly unhappy with family life, the authors lives' were girl- and women-centred. Brent-Dyer's life revolved around her teaching, her mother, her lodgers and her friends. Brazil involved herself with local schools in Coventry and gave parties for local children, as well as being active in numerous charities. Bruce was involved in the Girls' Guildry movement (which predated the Girl Guide movement) for more than thirty years. Oxenham was Guardian to a girls' Camp Fire group (originally an American girls' movement), as well as being an enthusiastic member of the English Folk Dance Society, then dominated by women.

There has been speculation that many of the women who wrote girls' school stories were lesbian, but there has been little evidence to support this, if by being lesbian we mean that they consciously had sexual feelings towards other women, resulting on occasion in genital contact. Helen McClelland notes that Brent-Dyer "was chiefly renowned at college for the way in which she took violent crushes on other students"; Gillian Freeman describes Brazil's "possessive passion"" for her friend Dorothy Milward; and there is speculation about the nature of Blyton's relationship with her friend Dorothy Richards. It should be remembered, though, that the early part of the twentieth century was still a period when it was accepted that women could have passionate relationships with each other, and that these were generally believed not to be sexual. McClelland warns that:

Today it has become almost impossible to believe in the existence of any adult woman so innocent - and ignorant - that all sexual or homosexual undercurrents flow past her unnoticed. Yet such women did exist. Moreover it seems probable that they numbered among them many of those who wrote schoolgirl fiction in the pre-war days.

Of course, at the same time it was believed that women did not have sexual feelings at all, so, whether sexual or not, it is difficult to see how their relationships with other women could be ranked below those relationships which they had with men. Certainly the writers were girl- and women-centred, and since they deviated from the heterosexual norms for twentieth-century British women of marriage and motherhood, they can be regarded as being queer.

In particular, it is interesting to note that both Blyton and Brent-Dyer are described by their biographers as being noticeably loud and exuberant girls, unable to conform to a "feminine" norm. Perhaps their writing, regarded as being a "quiet" activity, later provided their only outlet for travelling, for being noisy, for being the centre of attention - in the world of their imagination rather than as they experienced it externally. Barbara Stoney further writes that Blyton explicitly rejected a domestic role as a girl in favour of reading and going on excursions with her father (p18), withdrawing to an upstairs room or a friend's house after he left home (p27). She was the first girl in her school to have her long hair cut off to shoulder length, and later admitted that she had based her "Famous Five" character George - the girl who longed to be a boy and who dressed and acted like one whenever she could - on herself.

George is real, but she is grown-up now . . . The real George was short-haired, freckled, sturdy, and snub-nosed. She was bold and daring, hot-tempered and loyal. She was sulky, as George is, too, but she isn't now. We grow out of those failings - or we should! Do you like George? I do.

Stoney also notes that Blyton was unable to have children until she underwent a course of hormone treatment for an undeveloped uterus which had remained characteristic of that of a pre-adolescent girl. In the 1990s, what is known of Blyton's life is commonly taken as evidence that she "refused to grow up", but it may be that she was simply transgendered in a society which did not recognise this as being a possibility.

One final point about the authors of girls' school stories. Only Blyton, who wrote general children's fiction for all age-groups, made substantial amounts of money from her writing: for example, in 1923, almost twenty years before she started writing school stories, she earned over £300, the price of a small suburban house. Brent-Dyer, meanwhile, despite her writing output and her popularity, had to rely on her income from teaching and her lodgers to support herself and her mother for much of her life. The profits from girls' school stories, for the most part, went straight into the pockets of the male publishers; the financial reward given to the authors, along with their status generally, was always low.

Yet the authors took their writing extremely seriously. Brazil worked in a studio in her garden, plotting her books and her characters before beginning work on her story.

I am often asked if I only write when "the spirit moves me". If so, I fear I should get very little done. I think it is absolutely necessary to have certain definite daily hours set aside for literary work. Sometimes one's ideas flow best in the evening, but often the morning is one's brightest period.

Blyton wrote in a much quicker and less structured way, but allowed nothing to interfere with her daily work; while Brent-Dyer on occasion asked her mother to take her classes so that she could write.

However, their work was not taken seriously by anyone other than girls. The critical reception of the genre was marked by hostility for most of the twentieth century (see 7. The Critics of Girls' School Stories for details), and by the 1930s men were familiar enough with the genre to begin to ridicule it in the form of parodies (see 8. The Parodies of Girls' School Stories for details). Even teachers despised the stories; Freeman describes how:

On the first day of the autumn term in 1936, a new girl to St Paul's in London was stunned by a dramatic address from Ethel Shrudwick, the principal, who at morning prayers expressed the wish to collect the books of Angela Brazil and burn them.

Only girl power, then, was responsible for the rise of the genre and for its continuing popularity. The genre dominated popular fiction for girls until the middle of the twentieth century, when it was briefly and to a much lesser extent joined by adventure stories for girls (often set in schools), ballet stories (usually set in ballet schools) and pony stories (often featuring riding schools).

Publishers' attentions then turned to producing books aimed at both sexes, influenced by the growth of children's book criticism following the end of the Second World War (see 7. The Critics of Girls' School Stories, 1949-1995 for details). The representation of the "reality" of girls' lives in fiction and other forms of popular culture, always taken to be important in children's literature, was now believed to be paramount, as was the production of "good" children's books. In 1941, Penguin Books launched the first Puffin fiction books for children as "something of a counterblast to those who were thinking in terms of Angela Brazil and Enid Blyton". Librarians also began to promote alternatives to genre fiction, and opposition to Blyton's books in particular became widespread. Generally, the rise of other types of children's literature was seen as marking a "second Golden Age" of children's books, the first "Golden Age" being the half-century

However, many authors continued to write in the genre, among them Mabel Esther Allan, Margaret Biggs, Norma Bradley, Rita Coatts, Gwendoline Courtney, Antonia Forest, Janet Grey, Judith Grey, Helen S. Humphries, Sylvia Little, Joanna Lloyd, Phyllis Matthewman, Constance M. White, Jane Shaw and Elizabeth Tarrant. Popularity was not confined to Britain, either. In addition to widespread publication in the English-speaking parts of the former British Empire, the 1940s and 1950s marked a period of popularity for the genre in Europe. For example, in Sweden translations were published of Bruce's "Dimsie" books, Blyton's St Clare's series and the school stories of Phyllis Matthewman, together with re-issues of translations of earlier school stories, including those of Christine Chaundler. Brent-Dyer's books were published in Portugese, while Blyton's girls' books were republished in translation all over the world. Clearly the genre's representation of "reality" could not have been a factor here.

Brent-Dyer's published writing output actually increased with the closure of her school in 1948, but in June 1955 Bruce's publishers, the Oxford University Press, allowed all but the last four of her books to go out of print, and the publication of The Bartle Request the following year marked the end of her association with them. The Press, as with contemporary critics, librarians, teachers and parents, believed that the genre was effectively dead, and should certainly be buried as quickly as possible. Despite this, though, when the Chalet School series was launched in paperback by Collins in 1967, 198,539 copies were sold between May and October 1967: 169,938 at home and 28,601 in the export market. Sheila Ray points out that: "The writers of the 'Second Golden Age' had failed to make an impact on many children."

Girls' schooling had, of course, by now changed radically since the beginning of the twentieth century. By the second quarter of the century there was already a widespread belief that girls required a different type of education to that of boys, aimed at their domestic role in life, rather than their schools mimicking those of boys, while at the same time girls' culture was breaking up. At the same time there was a strong movement in favour of co-educational schools, although it took time to make its effects felt. The end of the Empire - which meant that many parents returned home to the UK - and the availability of free secondary education following the Second World War then led to the closure of the majority of the privately owned boarding and day schools where girls' school stories were set. Girls were still largely educated separately - indeed, working-class girls had only just become "schoolgirls" in large numbers - but the ethos driving their education was now very different.

By the 1960s, there was, despite evidence that girls achieved more when educated separately, a strong belief in the superiority of mixed-gender education as providing better training for "real life". This led many of the remaining girls' schools (both state-run and privately owned) to close, to amalgamate with boys' schools or to open their doors to boys. Girls were offered a similar core curriculum, but were still expected to study cookery and needlework while boys learned metalwork and woodwork and to play separate sports. Within the mixed-gender, state-run schools, uniforms were then either relaxed or abolished, taking away a staple identifier of the schoolgirl (although many British schools have reintroduced traditional uniforms since the beginning of the 1980s). In reality, too, girls' space is now much more proscribed; fear of assault, the increase in road traffic and the criminalisation of groups of young people mean that, out of school, today's schoolgirls are often isolated within their homes.

A similar picture emerges in an analysis of mainstream British popular culture of the 1990s. Girls are usually portrayed as attending mixed-gender, state-run schools (for example in the long-running BBC series Grange Hill, which is set in outer London). Plots may sometimes centre around groups of girls, but the all-female, enclosed world which is so crucial to the genre of girls' school stories is absent. Instead, girls' experiences are set within mixed-gender (and race), middle- and working-class school communities and sub-cultures. The characters' identity is now that of school students rather than schoolgirls, and their lives outside of school are portrayed as being equally or more important than their school experiences.

This is generally reflected in other children's books, magazines and television series in Britain in the 1990s: girls are more likely to be shown within the local community and their family than in school; where they are more likely to be shown in mixed groups; and to be identified by the American-inspired image of the teenager. There is no separate space for girls within broadcasting; the majority of children's books are produced for a "mixed" readership; and girls are left with only magazines such as Just 17 and Mizz to call their own. These magazines target girls as consumers, and readers' careers, political interests and aspirations are ignored. Content instead centres around boyfriends, sex, make up, shopping, popular music and fashion - subjects which are absent from or frowned upon in girls' school stories. Sport is most likely to be represented by male sports stars whose sports themselves are all-male: since the Second World War team sports such as hockey and cricket have declined rapidly amongst girls and women; to be replaced by activities such as aerobics which have strong links to body image and weight loss.

In other English-speaking countries, school and higher education continue to be represented as being central to characters' lives within popular culture. For example, in the US television series Beverly Hills 90210, scenes are frequently set in classrooms, and exams, discipline, sport and activities such as producing the school newspaper are all seen as being worthy topics for plot development. Undesirable characters are those who do not work hard at school. Likewise, in the Australian soap opera Home and Away, the school is an integral part of the community and many plots are set in it. Bobby, a reformed wild girl, has her finest moment when she gets her Higher School Certificate (HSC) and receives the Pupil of the Year award. Angel leaves the streets to study for her HSC; as does Finn, who stays on for another year after failing the first time; while Marilyn returns as a mature student specifically to take her HSC. Aspiring to succeed educationally is presented as being both important and within the reach of all.

But in Britain in the 1990s, popular culture presents education as being both marginal and beyond the aspirations of working-class characters. For example, in the film The Higher Mortals, made by the Children's Film Unit in 1993 and broadcast on Channel 4 on 25 September 1994 from 5.40-7.00pm, the plot revolves around five inner-city children, four boys and one girl, who are sent by the female Minister for Education to a minor public school which is threatened with recession-related closure. The children kidnap the Minister in order to make her admit that her plan is mistaken, asking why they are being trained for the "scrap heap". Then, when she tricks them, they burn the school down. The leading character, a schoolgirl, ends the film by saying that the school had to go as it was completely outdated; it is only now that her real education is beginning.

In the BBC soap opera EastEnders, school is presented only as a site for bullying and crime. In terms of higher education, the character Michelle Fowler goes to university, but the students are shown only as taking drugs and as acting irresponsibly towards her daughter Vicky, and a student boyfriend is revealed as a psychopath who makes continual threatening phone calls. The storyline returns to the university only when Michelle graduates, when she begins an affair with her much older tutor, Geoff. Her family are seen to treat her education with respect - "A Fowler with a degree, now that would be something," says her brother Mark (17 May 1994) - but they treat it as a one-off incident, beyond the realistic aspirations for their family and class. One other character, Kelvin, also goes to university, but this is used simply as a means of writing him out of the series and no scenes are set there.

Similarly, in the Channel 4 soap opera Brookside, schoolchildren take drugs, steal cars, go joyriding, smoke, have underage sex and abortions, and bully other children - there are no positive representations. Only three characters, Karen Grant, Mike Dixon and Beth Jordache, go on into higher education. Of these, Karen leaves the series, while Mike's studies are characterised by his interest in his band and video-making; there are no scenes showing his ordinary studies and interactions with other students. After graduation, Mike is unemployed and shown to be a dreamer, wanting to be a writer but without the talent to succeed; the message to the audience is clearly that his education was irrelevant to a working-class young man. Beth Jordache, meanwhile, goes to medical school only to begin a lesbian affair with her tutor, and dies before she graduates.

In the ITV soap opera Coronation Street, Andy MacDonald, the only young character to reach university, drops out to become a trainee supermarket manager, since the university world is irrelevant. Eventually he returns, but his graduation is marred by psychological problems resulting from his mother's affair with a gangster, and he himself is shown to be disenchanted with the educational system. And in the ITV soap opera Emmerdale, the University of Leeds is used as a setting to explore themes of disability and lesbianism, but the studies itself are unimportant and we never even find out what subject Rachel Hughes is studying. She then drops out after the death of her brother; her studies are irrelevant to "real life" and she begins a series of typically female administrative jobs, marries and has a child.

Nonetheless, despite representations of education elsewhere in British popular culture, new books are still being added to the genre of girls' school stories. For example: in the 1970s Anne Digby began her Trebizon series, set in a modern girls' private boarding school, with new books being published into the 1990s; and in the early 1990s Jean Ure began her Peter High series, set in a modern girls' state day school. The genre remains a popular form of reading for British girls, across boundaries of both race and class, and despite the fact that reading generally has declined in popularity among children and teenagers (see 9. The Fans of Girls' School Stories, 1990s Girl Fans for details). It is also, to a lesser extent, popular among women: from the mid-1980s onwards no fewer than six fan clubs were established in the UK for adult women fans, all with international memberships; and there are parallel organisations in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa (see 9. The Fans of Girls' School Stories, 1990s Women Fans for details.) Since 1996, fans have also established their own email discussion groups and web sites.

Other, distorted images of the schoolgirl remain common in wider British popular culture. Parodic images of the schoolgirl and the girls' school story continue to be prominent (see 8. The Parodies of Girls' School Stories for details). The slang use of "fabulous", invented by Elinor M.Brent-Dyer in her Chalet School series, has permeated the national consciousness with Jennifer Saunders' BBC comedy series Absolutely Fabulous (with Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders also regularly writes and performs instantly recognisable sketches set in girls' boarding schools). Pornography and prostitution, too, draw heavily on the schoolgirl image. In fact, the image of the schoolgirl is frequently associated with that of the British woman; the Conservative MP Virginia Bottomley was often caricatured in the media as a "head girl" in the early 1990s.

No such parallel exists for boys' school stories, however, despite the girls' genre being compared extremely unfavourably to the boys' books by the critics throughout the twentieth century, and the homo-erotic associations of boys' boarding school life. Yet, in contrast to women, school background remains important throughout British men's lives (judging by television representations, the image of the male Conservative MP as schoolboy would in fact be far more apt). "School feeds adult feeling of all kinds . . . It is connected with a person's sense of the kind of man he is, the kind of background he has or admits to, the niche he expects to occupy in the world or would like his children to have."

Yet the genre of girls' school stories has been regarded as unworthy of academic study until recently, despite the fact that the boys' books have consistently received attention. No doubt the key reason is the fact that it is popular fiction, produced by women, for girls. Foster and Simons note that: "Modern critical theory has come relatively late to children's literature, in particular that written for girls." With the strength of Cultural Studies and Media Studies within the academy today, it is easy to forget that only in the last quarter of the twentieth century was popular fiction or "low culture" deemed worthy of serious study. Even then, women authors are, of course, still taken far less seriously than men in every field of literary studies.

Similarly, literature produced for children has always been viewed as being less important than that produced for adults. Gaye Tuchman has found that, in nineteenth-century publishing houses, manuscripts were ranked in the descending order of "high prestige", "men's specialities", "mixed specialities" and "women's specialities", with children's books falling into the latter category.. Frank Eyre points out that: "Writers of children's books still achieve little recognition in any but their highly specialised professional circle, and writers about children's books are still regarded, consciously or unconsciously, as a kind of sub-species of critic - doing a secondary task from which the most successful of them may one day hope to be promoted to more responsible work." And, as Peter Hunt describes, children's books generally have been regarded as being "not a fit subject for academic study". In fact, the study of childhood in general has been seen as invalid; there is no place in the academy for Children's Studies, despite the fact that, as Hunt points out: "It can be argued that [children] belong, in effect, to a different culture - possibly an anti- or counter-culture".

Critics of children's books are therefore under pressure to prove the "literary" value of their subject, and the very fact that children's popular fiction is commercial fiction makes it suspect. Jacqueline Rose points out that: "The association of money and childhood is not a comfortable one. Money is impure. . . It is contaminated by association and exchange. Not so childhood." And since the majority of all types of critic are male, they have been unable to understand the resonance which the genre has for the majority of British girls and women. For whatever reason, both the critics and the male parodists have ensured that the genre's weaknesses and supposed weaknesses are better known than the actual stories. Meanwhile feminists assumed until recently that all of the messages contained within earlier books for girls - synonymous with a female authorship - must be negative ones. As a result, whereas the study of women writing romance fiction has rightly been regarded as worthy by feminists, this is largely because it has been perceived as relevant to women's lives today. Girls' school stories, in contrast, have generally been perceived as irrelevant and their popularity an embarrassing anomaly.

Clearly, though, the continuing importance of the genre's role in British society, as well as its historical position, means that it merits closer examination. In general, Hunt points out that:

Children's books have, and have had, great social and educational influence; they are important both politically and commercially. . .

From a historical point of view, children's books are a valuable contribution to social, literary and bibliographical history; from a contemporary point of view, they are vital to literacy and culture . . . in popular culture terms, they are central.

Hunt also points out that, worldwide, the study of children's literature is now a widely accepted research activity.

In the USA and Australia, especially, there are many programmes in children's literature and major research libraries. Carolyn Field's Special Collections in Children's Literature lists 267 collections; Tessa Chester's Sources of Information about Children's Books lists 157 specialist collections (including the 200,000-volume Opie collection in the Bodleian). There are specialist journals and societies, including the International Research Society for Children's Literature, a major European centre at the Internationale Jugendbibliotek in Munich, and national children's book centres in Germany, Sweden, Australia, Wales and elsewhere. Children's literature is an accepted division of the activities of the Modern Language Association of America.

With regard to the study of girls' school stories in particular, girls and women have few cultural spaces to call their own and few images of themselves, and it is important to reclaim and to re-evaluate them. As Maggie Humm points out: "A feminist re-vision makes a historical, cultural and psychic examination of women's cultural past, and creates a women's history." It is equally important to look at the ways in which the genre has been opposed and ridiculed by the critics and the parodists, the reasons why this took place, and why nonetheless there has been a continuing readership which has ensured the genre's survival until at least the end of the twentieth century. And in a society where literacy has never been more important and yet reading is declining, a greater understanding of how and why the genre has given pleasure in the twentieth century should be helpful in determining how to encourage young people - boys particularly, since they read the least - to continue to read in the twenty-first.

[RoosterDance]

A Case for Intergenerational Relationships Between Women
by girllori


According to US Department of Justice 1998 statistics, 97% of all reported sex crimes involved males. The most prevalent of these crimes is Rape. In worse case scenarios, the minor ends up getting murdered. Adults, mainly males, guilty of these sick and henious crimes should be punished to the full extent of the law (death included) and stronger laws should be enacted to re-enforce the protection of minors from sexually dysfunctional "males."

The 3% of female on female sex crimes involve lesbian couples and urban gang related activities. In this catagory, the crimes, while sexually oriented, have more to do with personal violation as opposed to passion.

It is my personal belief that some variations of inter or crossgenerational sex be allowed between the female adult and minor. Considering the current events involving youth and violence and the extremely poor example adults set and the legacy they are leaving, the line between today's youth's ability to make a clear, free-will decision regarding sex, FREE from adult coercion, force or manipulation is so fine, many will err on the side of caution and legally prohibit such freedom. This totally ignores the fact that these crimes are being committed by HETROSEXUAL males and minors and are done by "force."

As a 15 year old woman who proclaimed herself a lesbian and had knowingly enter into sexual affairs with adult females, I can only speak for myself in stating that there are exceptions to the rule. I represented the 10% of minors whom are capable of making life decisions on my own at an early age. I see the maturity level of a female to be vastly different from that of a male, especially for those under 18. At the risk of sounding female-centric, in matters surrounding the physiological intimacy of sexuality, I see the female as being genetically, psychologically, emotionally and physically superior to that of a male. The facts, or lack of them, bear me out on this.

In preparing this, I did months of research over the internet and in public/ private libraries. I was looking at incidence's of sexually related crimes against minors as they relate to gender and lifestyle choice. In the process, I came up with some very strange and alarming facts as to how this data, if it is even recorded, is categorized. For example, sexual crimes against women such as "rape" are referred to by the US Justice Department as "Intimate violence" and are NO LONGER categorized as to the gender of the perpetrator, but instead, the gender is neutralized and the offender referred to as an "intimate." In other words, a male does not rape a woman, an "intimate" does. Cool.

Some statistics, were just "cold blooded" and scared me. For example in regards to sexual crimes involving rape;

"In a high percentage of cases, the victims are children. In self-reported victimization surveys of the public age 12 and older, teenagers report the highest per capita rates of exposure to rape and sexual assault. Data drawn from police-recorded incidents of rape in three States revealed that 44% of rape victims were under the age of 18. The self-reports of convicted rape and sexual assault offenders serving time in State prisons indicate that two-thirds of such offenders had victims under the age of 18, and 58% of those--or nearly 4 in 10 imprisoned violent sex offenders-- said their victims were age 12 or younger."

And for those concerned about homosexual rape,

"Though the vast majority of violent sex offending involves males assaulting female victims, females account for a small percentage of known offenders, and males account for a small percentage of victims. In a very small fraction of sexual assaults, victim and offender are of the same sex.".

Another statistic worth mentioning is the "female to female" sexual assault. The fact of the matter is, when I was searching the net for crimes of sexual assault committed by "lesbians", I have found NO incidences of a prosecuted crime involving "lesbians." (This also includes adult/minor sexual contact among lesbians.) If the word "lesbian" was used in these crime reports, it was in reference to "gays and lesbians" as in "Gay and Lesbian organizations."

Does this mean there is NO sexual contact between adult and minor lesbians? I am living proof to the contrary. Does this mean IF there is such sexual contact between and adult and minor lesbian it does not get reported by either a victim or police agency? There are no statistics or studies to explain the lack of crime reports concerning lesbian sexual assaults against minor females other to theorize that IF they exist, they are in such small numbers as to render them inconsequential.

Getting back to my original thought, I am an advocate of some inter-generational contact, of a sexual nature, within the Lesbian community ONLY. Ah, but wait. I can just hear the "Sopphic Mother Voices" screaming to me, "Let children be children." or "leave the innocent girls alone." I am not suggesting "carte blanche" sexual contact between adult lesbians (key word: lesbians) and minors whom call themselves "lesbians." What I am suggesting is that

1.Women, in general, are the superior species when it comes to "affairs of the heart."
2.Woman mature both physically, emotionally and sexually at a faster rate than males.
3.Some females are capable of "life decisions" at an early age.
4.Young females (lesbian or straight) do not face a predatory and dysfunctional sexual adversary within their own gender, regardless of lifestyle choice, as they face it from the male specie.
5.There is no data, statistics or study done to suggest a problem with female to female sex (adult to adult), female to female sex (adult/ minor) or female to female sex (minor/minor). In fact, that lack of ANY information suggests that either female adult-minor sex does not even exist or if it does, it is one of the most closely guarded secrets of all time.

There have been many studies done to justify the arbitrary cut off age of 18 years as being the age where one becomes an adult. This is to say, there are only studies done to reinforce the notion that youth under 18 are incapable a rational, intelligent, life decisions. Absent from this are any studies that prove those over 18 are automatically capable of such decision making skills either. Just by looking at the sorry state of the history of human existence leads me to believe that many adults, at any age, are incapable of making wise and logical common sense decisions involving the greater good.

The history of the human specie shows us that the concept of "childhood" as we know it now, did not spawn into existence until the industrial age. That begot the 40 hour work week and a thing we now take for granted, the luxury of free time. In pre-industrial revolution days, the concept of "childhood" meant you were dependent upon the parental units, the tribe, clan or community for your existence. You added nothing. So there was great pressure for a "child" to grow up as to become independent of self and a asset for the greater good of all around.

So, pre-industrial revolution youth had all the faculties of making intelligent and prudent decisions. Then after the industrial revolution, they suddenly lost those skills? No. Youth is still the same. Only technology and perspective's have changed. I would add as a social commentary that modern youth has been lulled into a self- destructive complacency thrust at them by a guilt-ridden, "me-first" adulthood. While adults will argue this point from their pseudo-psychological altars, the fact still remains, youth has always had the ability to make common sense, logical and prudent decisions.

The thought of sexual union between adult and youth is still very much aberrant in mainstream society, especially in light of the high profile cases of men luring young women into sex. On top of that there are groups such as catholic priests and NAMBLA (both male organization) advocating the lowering of the age of consent in regards to man-boy "love" and an ever increasing amount of males luring teen boys over the internet for the purposes of sex. Absent from all of this is the female or lesbian angle. Again I ask, is it that lesbian adult - youth sex does not happen? Or could it be that such unions amongst women hold a much higher or shall I say, a special place, in the female psyche?

As a closing argument, let's just look for a second at the laws in the UK.

Lesbian sex has never been illegal in Britain. An attempt to criminalise it in 1921 was successful in the House of Commons but was rejected by the House of Lords, where opponents pointed out that to do so might "bring it to the notice of women who have never heard of it"!

It is not true however that there is no age of consent for lesbian sex - there is, and it is 16. Lesbian sex is not explicitly mentioned in the law, but a girl of under 16 is deemed not capable of consenting to any sexual act. Under age lesbian sex can therefore (and has been) prosecuted as "indecent assault on a girl under 16".

Consider that the US law that still has on it books in many states that same sex carnal unions are "unnatural" and therefore are illegal and punishable under law. The US still clings on tenaciously to its archaic "over 18 is an adult" laws. Perhaps we could learn a bit or two from our British friends.

This article only touched on a few of the many aspects leading up to my major point that Lesbian adult-youth unions should be legally allowed. Canada , for example, recently changed their age of legal consent to 16 years of age. I do not hold the same opinion in regards to Gay male-youth relationships. As I have stated, woman is superior to male in those aspects involving the emotionality's of conjugal relationships. Lastly, I have brought up through inference that youth has the capabilities of making life-choice decisions far earlier than the law allows.

I would invite all comments on this issue, pro or con. (see under "sources of information") I have deliberately left some comments and statements, open ended. This is purely an academic exercise. I do have a far larger and more involved thesis I am working on involving this subject. But check out the US and Worldwide laws for Age of Consent until then.

[RoosterDance]

Bathing Beauties
by Anna Schnur-Fishman, Lilith
A teenage girl and her friends learn the radical concept of loving their bodies


NOT LONG AGO some summer-camp girlfriends and I had a sleepover, and at about 3 a.m., after we'd exhausted the topics of cute guys and the new 2005 SATs, the talk turned to our 16-year-old bodies: thighs, bellies, hair, boobs, booties. Did we like them? Did Jess wish she had Nomi's legs, did Maggie covet Natasha's complexion? Did we hate changing in the school locker rooms, did we plotz at the thought of being seen in our bikinis?

Sprawled out on sleeping bags, munching on mini-marshmallows and Cheez Doodles, we were somewhat surprised to find out that we all shared a similar sentiment: We felt fine about our bodies. Sure, Natasha confided, she wished her boobs were "more symmetrical," and Maggie that she had "less hairy upper-inner thighs," but in a hierarchy of things that obsessed us, these issues fell fairly low on the list. We looked, we all agreed, "good enough" for the locker rooms. And at the beach? Well, chicken legs, love handles, flat chests . . . they were just what we'd been dealt.

We knew that this level of body acceptance was very different from that of most teenage girls. America's consumerist culture, after all — the vast self-improvement aisles at pharmacies, women's magazines that promise 6 or 8 or 10 steps to a perfect butt month after month, our society's fixation on Hollywood looks — all seem almost intended to make girls feel like shit. Each one of us knew girls who stuck to mineral water while the rest of us split Chinese food, who passed up incredible class trips because the thought of someone seeing them undressed or without makeup flipped them out.

It was clear to us that our summer camp's overall culture had, to some extent, immunized us against this teen epidemic of body loathing. But how?

"The BIK," Toni said, referring to our camp's communal bathhouse, a plain concrete building — one side for girls, the other for boys — where we all (campers, counselors, assorted others) day after day, and summer after summer, showered naked with each other. BIK is a Hebrew acronym for bait keesay ("house of the chair"), a euphemism for bathroom. Ours — with its no-frills shower rooms — wasn't anything to write home about: the pipe missing its showerhead, dozens of bottles of shampoo, conditioner, and body wash strewn over a couple of wooden shelves, the slightly slimy floor.

Early in the morning or late at night there might be only two or three showerers in the BIK, but at rush hours like right before Shabbat or just after swim, there's hardly standing room. The building is intended for use by campers 12 or 13 and older, but as the single-shower stalls in the younger kids' bunks inevitably break and flood, they often use the BIK regularly, too.

In the BIK, a 10-year-old camper rinsing off after a swim might suddenly find herself in a room full of naked singing 15-year-olds and counselors — and maybe a nurse or lifeguard or two — every one of them exhibiting an impressive ease with exposing their differently shaped bodies. "It's like the Great Equalizer," said Toni through a mouthful of Cheerios, "a place where you see all these differently shaped bodies that make you realize how ridiculous it would be to spend every minute of every day miserable about how you look."

"And when you're 8 or 10 or 12," someone else chimed in, "and you see all the older girls you completely idolize having very not ideal bodies, but they're singing and chatting and doing the naked hokey-pokey, discussing what kind of potato chip they like, you see that they're 100 percent comfortable being naked, and you want to have that comfort, too."

The lessons we learned at the BIK are profound (and extremely countercultural). Here are six properties that I think made the BIK work for us:

It requires an initial leap of faith. When a girl first steps into the BIK naked (a lot of girls start out showering in their bathing suits, and then there's that day when they "take it all off"), it's scary. You have to pretend you feel fine when you really don't, hoping that pretending turns into the real thing. It does.

There's a culture of support. The larger culture makes you feel inadequate, and the truth is that the constant competition is exhausting. The BIK is a relief from that. Everyone who steps into the BIK is affirming an implicit covenant: We support one another. Being naked was (or is) difficult for every single one of us — and that creates a feeling of safety.

It's multigenerational. The larger culture is pretty age-segregated, so the 8-to-25-year-old population of the BIK is unique. For younger girls, being able to identify with older females is a source of pride. The older girls and counselors, for their part, know that they are role models for the young showerers, and having that "responsibility" provides a potent incentive to be, as one counselor told me, "positive and open and free about our bodies."

The BIK is a reality check. Showering with dozens of other females over the course of a summer means that you see bodies of all different shapes and sizes. It cures you of the oppressive belief that you're the only one who is imperfect. Hannah, 16, recalls one shower during which every girl put forward her largest physical insecurity. Hannah's overwhelming memory is that she hadn't noticed any of these things — a mole on the backside of someone's ear, different-colored nipples, a faint unibrow. "It suddenly occurred to me that the things I obsessed about, other people weren't noticing about me, either," Hannah says.

It's pushing back against American culture. It's unbelievable — and tragic — to realize that it's actually subversive for females to feel okay about their bodies, to take back our right to feel even adequate. As one of my friends said, "We should be arrested for feeling this good about ourselves."

It's joyful! When you're naked in the shower and your whole self is out there for everyone to see, you basically have nothing more to lose. You can regress to the years before you learned to feel insecure about your body and, like a toddler, just enjoy the opportunity to run around nude. It's pure liberation.

Showering in the BIK is affirming, empowering, and fun, and it gives us the tools we need to keep working at the ongoing struggle for self-acceptance. The greatest challenge is during the winter months, when, lonely under the showerhead, you begin to feel too fat, or too flat, and you have to work to recall the lessons of the BIK.

"At home I try to spread the BIK just by being completely accepting of people — in every way, but especially physically," said Toni. "Everyone has the potential to be comfortable with her body, but not everyone has the privilege."

[RoosterDance]

Chantelle's Story
by Chantelle


When did I realize that I was a girllover? Ooo boy. I'm not sure I can pin it down to one specific moment. You see, I'm not the kind of person who caught herself staring at little girls or peeking in the locker room. For me, finding out was when I realized that I'd gone and fallen for a little girl in my scouts troupe.

We've been close since she came to my troupe as a shy 11 year old. I was 22. Last summer we spent practically everyday together, and I spent the night at her house almost every night. She's the person I could horse around with when all my other friends were "too cool" to play around like that with someone so young. She's the person I could talk to for hours and still not be bored, even when we didn't talk about anything in particular.

So, when did I even start to suspect that my feelings for her extended beyond friendship? I think I'd have to say when I learned that she was moving out of state. I was devestated, though I did a good job of hiding it at the time. I didn't want to give her a weepy send off or seem foolish, so I hid my pain and tears until after I'd already said bye. I remember feeling indescribebly lonely without her around.

I did email her from time to time, but it wasn't the same until she emailed me saying that we didn't talk like we used to. I realized that she was right and we started to use instant messengers to keep in touch. We still talk almost everyday and even a short chat session with her makes me grin like an idiot.

Then, that Easter she invited me to spend a week with her and her family. I distinctly remember the ride down there. I was jumpy and expectant and incurabley dreamy.

Now up until this point, I had never even thought of myself as a lesbian, let alone one who is attracted to 11 year old girls. It was simply a case of "yes, I have a crush on someone, end of story". I'd just gotten out of yet another disasterous relationship with a guy that was an absolute jerk. Truth be told, I'd never had much luck with guys as it was.

That week was one of the best of my life. One of the moments that sticks out most distinctly in my mind is when the two of us were walking alone and she reached out and put her little arm around my waist. I was so completely shocked but at the same time, it opened up my mind to a whole new field of possibilities. It would take me another half year however, before I was able to sort out those feelings.

Oddly enough, I was at work and mindlessly bored when I realized just exactly how much she meant to me. It was quite literally like hitting a brick wall and I think I scared the person sitting next to me, I jerked my head up so quickly. I LOVED her. Not like sisterly love or best friends forever. This was an honest to goodness, want to be with this little person love! I was reeling and off balance for the rest of the day.

I didn't say anything to anyone at the time, though this discovery was rather troubling to me. At one moment, I'd be ready to call her up and tell her and then at the next, I'd be appalled with myself. How could I do this to our friendship? What if she hated me for it? And then, not only her, but what about her parents? Somehow, I didn't think they'd appriciate their 11 year old daughter's best friend declaring her feelings for their child. Or my parents for that matter? Some nights I'd cry myself to sleep, calling myself stupid for getting myself into such an impossible situation. Then I'd turn right around and chide myself for being so hopeless. And through this whole time, I was still talking to her online daily, not letting on just how confused I was about my feelings towards her.

I went to visit her again that summer for three months. She was 12 now. Things weren't the same however, and I'm afraid that's my fault. I was so confused over my feelings for her that I let it affect our friendship. It was even starting to affect me physically and I realized that I was allowing myself to slide into a bout of depression. I remember one night when I couldn't sleep. Though we slept in different rooms, the rooms were connected. I grabbed my pillow and headed into her room. All I really wanted to do was crawl into the bed with her and hold her. Nothing sexual, simply to hold and be held. That's always been one of my greatest desires. I was too much of a coward to, afraid that she'd wake up and want to know what I was doing up. So I just sat on the floor by her bed and watched her sleep. I was crying horribly, but not too loudly because I was so afraid of waking her up. Eventually, I just gave up trying to work up my courage and went back to my bed.

She later commented on the gap that was forming between us and I relized that she was right. I spent the remainder of my time trying to bridge that gap, though I don't think it was completely spanned until we said goodbye at the bus station and then it was her initiative not mine, I'm ashamed to say. But the fact remains that the gap was spanned, a fact that I am eternally grateful for.

I knew after that that I loved her for sure, but I still didn't have the courage to tell her. And still, all this time, I was talking to her on a nearly daily basis. I'd been introduced to a few message boards that summer, and was slowly starting to accept my attraction to little girls as a normal thing for me. I always believed there was nothing wrong with it, but for it to actually be my lifestyle was a completely different thing.

Truthfully, I didn't even start to come out until my mother and I started to argue over something trivial. My mom has the knack of telling when something other than what I'm saying is bothering me. I told her nothing, but what I was really thinking was 'I'm a dyke mom. Your baby girl's a freakin' dyke! And what's more, I'm in love with a 12 year old child.' I went up to my room after that, hoping to be left alone so I could cry in peace. I've never been much of a person when it comes to dealing with conflict. I guess I forgot just how well sound travels in my house and my mom came up to see what was wrong with me.

Now that I look back in retrospect, I think I wanted her to come up. She asked me what was wrong, but all I could do was keep crying. Most of me knew she would be accepting of the whole thing, but there was still that niggling bit of doubt at the back of my mind that wouldn't let me speak. Eventually I managed to get out a "Mom, I think I'm not straight." All she did was hug me and then tell me to come downstairs where she proceeded to make me a cup of tea. She then told me that it's normal to be unsure of one's sexuality but no matter what I chose, she'd always be there for me. My dad, who I'd woken up with my crying, had come downstairs and said to the effect, the same thing. I was about ready to break down and sob again right there, but my mom said something which made me laugh instead which resulted in me sputtering tea all over the table. Since then, I've told a couple friends of mine. I haven't told my little friend yet, because I'm waiting to tell her to her face. I don't think it would be very fair of me to take the easy way out and tell her online or over a phone.

So now I accept the fact that I'm a lesbian, that guys are really just too guy-like for me, no matter how sensitive they are, and that I've fallen for a little 12 year old girl.

So why did I include all of those details above? Well, to me, those little things are as much a part of my coming out as the actual act. While it's true that I may sound rather emotional at some points and over dramatic, I've never been one to do things by halves. This is simply an account of my feelings and actions that led up to accepting myself for who I am. Thank you for reading my story.

[RoosterDance]

Support for Underage Lesbians
from Lesbian Information Service, Lancashire UK


It is hard for heterosexuals to understand what it is like being lesbian and growing up with that knowledge in a society which hates and fears homosexuals. Everywhere you turn you hear something negative about homosexuality - on the television, in newspapers, from your friends, from parents, grandparents and siblings, from other kids at school, from teachers! Because of pending legislation there is currently a lot of discussion around the Age of Consent for male homosexuals. Turn on the television and you are likely to hear famous and 'respectable' politicians coming out with blatantly homophobic remarks. On Monday, 10th January 1994, BBC News at mid-day, Lady Olga Maitland, M.P., suggested that older homosexuals would pressurise young men into homosexuality and that this would "deprive them of future personal happiness, of family life and really, in a sense, being on the fringe of society." She continued, "If a girl of 16 has sexual intercourse she is carrying out, in a sense, a natural heterosexual function. But if a boy is forced into that mode he then could be forced into a sexuality for the rest of his life which would make him very troubled and very disturbed and very unhappy." On the BBC early evening news of the same day, Valerie Riches, Family & Youth Concern, said: "Heterosexual activity, even amongst 16-year-olds, is at least a normal activity. Homosexual activity is not normal, it is unnatural." Again on the same day, on BBC television, Lord Hailsham said "I think it [homosexuality] is a corrupt and corrupting vice."

We, Lesbian Information Service, are currently supporting a thirteen-year-old lesbian. Paula knew about her sexuality when she was eleven but it was two years before she spoke to anyone about it. She desperately needed support and told her school teacher whose response was to say that she was too young to make such a serious decision; the teacher now seems to avoid Paula. She told her best friend who, initially, said it was okay but has since become distant and constantly asks Paula, "When are you going to have a boyfriend?" Most recently, a boy in her class asked Paula out. When she refused he taunted her with: "Are you a lesbian, then?" Paula wanted to say, "Yes, I am, so what?" instead she told him to "Get lost."

Paula is one of the few younger lesbians who has contacted us after learning about our helpline in a magazine. We seem to be getting more and more calls from younger lesbians. Remafedi (1990) says:

"The youngest adolescents who are grappling with the possibility of homosexuality appear to be especially vulnerable to stigma and isolation because of emotional and physical immaturity, inexperience, the need to belong to a peer group, and dependence on families, schools, and communities for help during the transition to adulthood."

When Paula telephones she is often upset and cries when she tells us about the latest anti-homosexual joke or incident she has witnessed at school. She is desperate for support nearer home and, whilst it seems her parents may be supportive - one of their relatives is lesbian and her parents have gay friends - Paula is terrified to tell them. She fears they will not believe her.

We are able to give Paula limited support over the telephone and, more recently, she has felt able to receive information from us in the form of a booklet called "i think i might be a lesbian ... now what do i do?" Paula lives in a city where there is a Young Lesbian Group, which is quite rare. However, the Group meets a few miles away, in the evening, and the lower age limit is 16 years. It will be some time before Paula is able to meet other young lesbians of her own age.

To some degree Paula is fortunate to have come across our telephone number and to have had the confidence to call us; she can at least share her anger and sadness. But she is still without access to other young lesbians for friendship and without the support of those most dear to her, her parents.

Of the 20 lesbians we have interviewed, most knew they were 'different' at an early age and most had no-one to talk to for years. Without anyone to talk to young lesbians bottle up their feelings; many use drugs and alcohol to cope with their isolation.

Young lesbians do not need to become alcohol/drug dependent, depressed or suicidal, although because of isolation most are depressed during the very vulnerable early stages of coming out. Hetrick and Martin (1987) note:

"In a non-threatening supportive environment that provides accurate information and appropriate peer and adult role models, many of the concerns [of lesbian and gay youth] are alleviated and internalized negative attitudes are either modified or prevented from developing."

But Young Lesbian Groups are few and far between, often only exist in large cities and are rarely adequately staffed with specially trained workers who know how to deal with the issues (most groups are run on a part time basis). Young lesbians hold onto years of pain, anger, fear, guilt, shame, and sadness inside them. When their emotions do come out this often takes the form of self-harm. I knew I was different when I was eleven but talked to no-one for years and did not come out until I was 23 years old. At my 18th birthday party I got drunk and, because the girl I was in love with was hitting it off with a chap and I couldn't tell her about my feelings, I tried to walk under a moving car. That wasn't the first time I'd been drunk nor felt suicidal.

[RoosterDance]

The Paedophile Impulse: Toward the Development of an Etiology of Child-Adult Sexual Contacts from an Ethological and Ethnological Viewpoint1
by Gisela Blelbtreu-Ehrenberg2


I. Introduction

The term "paedophile" in the following presentation will be understood as the sexual contact of adults with children before puberty, regardless of the sex of the partners. As is well known, every culture determines what is understood by "adult" according to its own needs; here it means an age that lies in every case after puberty. Thus contacts between "adults" and "children"-so defined by their culture-will not be subsumed under the concept of paedophilia here if both partners have already reached puberty, for then it is merely a question of contact between adults of different ages. In this connection, the degree of age difference is unimportant.

The present essay is an attempt to describe the sexual impulse of those persons who prefer close bodily-emotional contacts with prepuberal children to those with adults, and where the impulse in question is an integrating moment of the whole personality. Let it be emphasised from the beginning that contacts of this kind are fundamentally free of force. If they are not, it is not paedophilia that is present, but rather an offence to be considered legally punishable.


II. Causes of the Negative Evaluation of Child Sexuality and of Child-Adult Sexual Contacts in our Cultural Domain

l.) Traditional Hatred of the Body

The traditional hatred of the body in our civilization goes back to the pre-Christian philosophers and thinkers of ancient Greece,3 by whom the Apostle Paul, as an educated man, was strongly influenced. No indications of hatred of the body are found in the Gospels. Through Paul's missionary work, however, genuine Christian demands were so inseparably mixed with pagan ascetic ideals that Christian dogma, both in patristic and scholastic teaching, was inconceivable without them; in contrast to their cultivation, the primary demands of the Gospels were often neglected. Sexuality was rated as negative, as long as it did not serve reproduction; and even then it was good only as a means to reproduction, not as an expression of life suigeneris. Idealized, on the other hand, was asexuality. "chastity". Therefore it is obvious that sex with children, since they are not mature enough for reproduction, would be regarded as altogether evil and could not even be considered value-neutral. To the extent that some later works on this theme express other theories,4 they generalize relationships that doubtless existed, but which have never/ had ecclesiastical and general sanction, as is shown by all the penitentials, confessionals and textbooks of moral theology that have ever been found.5

In the late middle ages and early modern times the fear of syphilitic infection presents a further and often overlooked motive for demanding chastity, especially for very young persons. Chastity at the time constituted the only possible protective measure against the still incurable disease. Similar considerations are evoked today, as we know, by the appearance of AIDS: moralistic and hygienic measures against the epidemic are entering into a symbiosis not objectively justified. Thus "innocence" in the sense of being sexually untouched, becomes equated with "health" in the sense of being disease-free. These ideas in turn find apparent support from a false literal interpretation of the Biblical injunction "...the wages of sin is death."

2.) The Pretended Asexuality of the Child

When Rousseau writes at the beginning of his Emile, "Everything is good as it comes from the hands of the Creator, everything degenerates under the hands of man the effects of the above-mentioned dogmas, believed for centuries, show themselves. For Rousseau, child sexuality meant degeneration6, so that, in following his concept of education, people were to try as long as possible (even until after the 18th year!) to do all they could to keep from children everything that would remind them, even distantly, of sexuality. We now know, at least since Freud, that children are not asexual beings, yet the influence of Rousseau continues to have an effect today. In the meantime children are "allowed" to masturbate and "play doctor", but if they seek to learn something about sexuality or direct sexual practices from those from whom they are otherwise accustomed to learn most things, namely from adults, then the majority of the population feels this to be a violation of the child's "purity". They assume (even in the face of proof to the contrary) that an ineradicable emotional harm has been caused and demand punishment of the "culprit" as if he were the worst kind of criminal.7

What actually offends society about paedophilia, however, is not something inherent in it. Rather the offence is in its violation of the above-mentioned ideologies, which are partly Christian and partly of a pseudo-enlightenment tendency. The ideologies, further, assume the absence of child sexuality, so that its presence is seen as "against nature", when in reality nature has in fact already bestowed sexuality upon the child. In addition, the "seducer" might undermine the child's acceptance on faith of these ideologies, which for the child they are simply prohibitions. His actions are therefore subversive to repressive educational goals.

A third prohibiting ideology is the recent apodictic assumption, raised from an extreme feminist standpoint, that sexual contacts of adults with non-adults (even as far as concerns sexually mature adolescents already beyond puberty) is in principle never free of force and therefore always criminal. This last conviction is just as unprovable as the two previously mentioned traditional views, but is based on its protagonists' belief in their own deductions.


III. Child Sexuality as a Component of the Physiological Make-up of Primates

Fortunately nature pays no attention to what people from one epoch to another have understood, and understand, as being "natural". Let us then take Rousseau at face value: "Everything degenerates under the hands of man." In fact! If we had indeed drawn the desired consequences from the ideologies that stretched over two centuries, then in the meantime the West would probably have become really empty of people. Children must learn sexuality before their own sexual maturity in order to be able to practise it without conflict in their adult years. Reared in isolation according to Rousseau's concept, they would certainly become neurotics unfit for marriage. And in reality children do learn sexuality, only they learn it from other children, i.e., in a subculture carefully kept hidden from the adult world. If this has begun to change recently in the case of a few progressive parents, one may still assert that, for the majority of all children in our civilization, sexuality remains even today a book with seven seals until they begin to concern themselves about their own "sex education". In doing so, however, a "knowledge " of reproduction and birth is often spread and believed that is simply fantastic, that in turn calls forth new fears and insecurity. Here young primates and children in certain primitive cultures have it easier.

l.) Child Sexuality in Anthropoid Apes

If, in the following considerations, animal sexual behaviour is the starting point that leads by further thinking to conclusions about human behaviour, then it must be expressly emphasized ahead of time that such comparisons must always be entered into with great care.9 Human beings are not the same as beasts, and the greater the nearness of the anthropoid apes to homo sapiens in the rank of evolution is presented, the more care is required in comparisons of this kind.10 As a rule of thumb it may certainly be held that the importance of learning increases, and that of instinct decreases, the higher a creature is ranked in the order of the primates.11 In the human being pure instinctive behaviour is strongly reduced. Possibly, however, the degree of the remainder of instinct still present in each individual of our kind varies and is related besides to the domain of the instinct, so that much that in reality is perhaps a remainder of instinct appears, falsely, as something individual, through factors of social behaviour appropriate to personal socialization,12 and vice versa.

The importance of learning for primates depends on their form of life; unlike martens, bears or moles, for example, primates are not loners, but social beings, and practically everything they learn is learned through and from adult members of their group or older siblings or somewhat older members of their "peer group". Learning and the forming of a tradition tend always and necessarily to be bound up with one another; at first, no doubt, predominately those "customs " were continued that made survival easier.13 Among the early forms of our own kind that have died out the handing down of newly found, meaningful and existence maintaining forms of relations must have been continued and substantially enlarged.

The enormous differences in the traditions that are found among human beings makes clear how manifold (and sometimes, from our modern standpoint, meaningless) are the traditions that have been handed down (such as the belief in local spirits, the power of ancestors, the danger of some special kind of sex, food tabus, etc.). In spite of their absurdity, however, such traditions are neither conscious deceptions of priests nor savage superstitions. Rather, every tradition acts in spite of its objective truth as social cement. The same mechanism holds for social prejudices.14

Ethologists, ethnologists and anthropologists all agree that the importance of learning in nonhuman primates and in humans cannot be overestimated. To the content of what must be learned by being taken in and internalized during childhood belongs without doubt, among many other things, the sexual behaviour usual in the respective culture. That is, learned sexuality (or the learned ideal of asexuality) is dependent on the respective cultural traditions. This even holds mutatis mutandis for the non-human primates, since they must learn the sexual behaviour typical for their own place in the ranking order.

Primates become sexually mature at very different ages, according to how long-lived the respective species is on the average. Many young monkeys and anthropoid apes only a few days old already show forms of behaviour that appear to be derived from sexual ones, but which in that early stage of life obviously are not yet "meant" as sexual. Thus, for example, the exhibition of the penis (with an erection) is a display of power and in certain monkeys (Totenkopfaffchen), when they are babies, is to be classified as a playful imitation of the threatening gestures of adult males.15 For their part, these "threats" are taken no more seriously than they are meant. Even these animals, which in intellect stand far below the anthropoid apes, are thus already able to distinguish between the pure gesture and the age or maturity of the one making it. In chimpanzees and gorillas the adult animals, even the alpha-male, tolerate the fact that playing young animals, from the age of the baby to the small 'child', tug at the fur, constantly cross over the distance that is maintained among adults according to their rank, take food away from adult animals, and do not react to their defensive and threatening behaviour; obviously the adults comprehend that the 'youngsters' just do not yet know better.

Behaviour derived from mating behaviour, such as "mounting" (actually a precondition for coitus), is found in young anthropoid apes partly as play, partly as so-called "demonstrations of rank";16 they always learn by watching the actions of adult members of the troop. Masturbation has been observed in many adult males although at the same time sexually mature females stood available; this was observed in prepuberty, to be sure, only in the intellectually especially high-ranking chimpanzees.17 In order to learn the coitus behaviour of mature animals, young chimpanzees must be able to observe older ones doing it. Examples reared alone A la Rousseau's Emile and then at the onset of their sexual maturity set loose in a pen with females ready to mate did not know how they were to behave. To be sure, most showed a definite interest in the females and noticeable restlessness, but many did without any kind of sexual activity of their own at all. Females reared in isolation often regarded male attempts to approach as attempts on -life and limb" and reacted with panic. Animals that have had only slight contact with others of the same species. but which nonetheless have not entirely had to do without it, of ten attempt sexual behaviour according to the system of "trial and error", and even animals that exercise extensive opportunity to observe older members of their species in coitus behaviour, must practice the coitus behaviour typical to chimpanzees until they finally master it. Chimpanzees, however, on the basis of their higher intelligence, can still learn functional sexual behaviour even after an abnormal childhood, so long as they are confronted with it as "adolescents"-although such animals have distinct problems with it.18

The aforementioned "mounting" (originally the mature copulation behaviour of male monkeys) has become in an extraordinary number of species what ethologists call a "status gesture" or "demonstration of rank". I personally believe that ethologists make it somewhat too easy for themselves when they bring into play here terms that are unsuitable for animals, and would prefer the designation "pacifying gesture" (Befriedungsgeste). Otherwise, it appears to me, one concludes too directly that there is a constant readiness for conflict, which that gesture does not convincingly express. The investigation of the whole field in question suffers besides from the similarity of such behaviour to that of humans, which plainly evokes errors.

The only thing certain is that "mounting" on the one hand and "presenting" (i.e., offering to allow oneself to be mounted) on the other are gestures that on the breaking out of conflicts almost instantly restore the peace, since they set in motion an almost immediate restraint to aggression in the stronger (mounting) animal. The connection between the former sexual and the later social meaning of this gesture is likewise clear: in primates19 freedom from aggression is a component of the act of copulation. The fact that female animals of higher rank also occasionally mount lower ranking ones show how strongly ritualized the gesture is. The situational context shows that here it is not a question of homosexuality. Presenting is obviously learned by all the babies (male as well as female) from their own mothers, who daily use it as a pacifying gesture toward stronger animals. This social learning is carried out on the model "identification through imitation".20 Animals reared in isolation could not learn even the peace-making content of these reactions that are derived from types of sexual behaviour. Those "unskilled" in such remained social outsiders.

Not directly sexual, but probably sexually flavoured types of behaviour such as caressing, romping, fondling, licking body openings, and "grooming" definitely serve the group peace in primates; they signal sympathy and a feeling of belonging together,21 but can also and at the same time be foreplay to sexual acts. Similar nonaggressive caring behaviour was at first of value only to their own young and in the course of primate evolution was much later-and indeed at first within the framework of courting-transferred to the sexual partner, wherein the bringing of food and nonaggressive gestures in an often highly ritualized form resurface. Also, in primates that live in groups without forming permanent couples, individual variations that are obviously connected with the "rank order" of the two animals clearly appear in the contacts with their various sexual partners.22

2.) Child Sexuality in Primitive Peoples

The usual division between civilized and primitive peoples easily leads the uninitiated astray: it is self-evident that there are no human beings without culture.23 By the term "primitive peoples" one understands today-after overcoming the linear evolutionism of the preceding century-peoples without writing or such as belonged to a high civilization that has in the meantime perished, or whose material culture has since sunk very low.

Different cultures are remarkably at variance on the question of child sexuality and its evaluation. Some judge that this area of learning is just as important as all the others or even one of the most important altogether, and so teach it intensively and unaffectedly.24 Others hold only limited sectors of sexuality (such as those relating to pregnancy and birth) as worth teaching, thus making an evaluative selection.25 We ourselves, and other peoples as well,26 hold a rigid sexual rearing to be desirable and are inclined to declare morally inferior any of the goals of education that do not practically exclude sexuality. All three views mentioned, including their intermediate forms, are determined purely traditionally and are in no way "natural" in the sense of a pre-formation exclusively determined by instinct. The nearly supreme power of the compulsion to learn in our species, in union with the still enormous impressibility of the infant brain, leads indeed to the fact that, for example, the sexual customs of the West that are acquired by rearing have been viewed until the most recent past as evidently given by nature.

Since the pedagogical treatment and social evaluation of child sexuality in primitive peoples is extremely diverse, it would be absurd, within the framework of a short essay such as this, to bring examples of this or that customary behaviour, which, moreover, are discussed in the literature mentioned in the notes. Sexology dearly loves the most exotic examples possible (thick books on the subject thrive on them!), but in the end they only tell us very little, if we do not take into consideration the whole of the respective culture from which the examples in question came. Moreover they often lead thoroughly into error: namely, viewed only by themselves they produce in the naively ethnocentric European grotesquely false representations of the life of the people in question, since he, unconsciously selective, only observes what appears to him strange and therefore interesting-for example, the sexual liberty of young and very young people in certain cultures. He thereby overlooks the numerous food tabus that exceedingly complicate life in the same society, for food tabus do not appear to him as a European to be important. if he then reports either enthusiastically or in horror on the "liberty" of the society in question, he perceives only one side of the coin-since the "liberty" that he notices is perhaps the only one there is altogether in the people in question, for all expressions of their life except sexuality are constrained by rites, tabus, traditions, etc., to the limit of the endurable. Therefore if I give here only a few examples and limit myself to more general statements, this is because to give a detailed cultural comparison would require not an essay or a book, but rather an encyclopedia in which, in every case, along with child sexuality the whole of the respective culture of a people would be treated. Brought to a simple sounding but pertinent common denominator, one may in good conscience declare about the child sexuality of primitive peoples: There is simply nothing that does not occur. And the farther one goes back historically to include in the analysis the circumstances of antiquity or those of the ancient Orient and the civilizations of Asia in the past, then the more colorful are the results presented.27 As cause of any particular evaluation of child sexuality found among primitive peoples, the following may be agreed upon in general: The respective racial traditions with their myths, their genesis and fertility legends, and further the cultural characteristics of the groups in question, now treated as geographically spread out and viewed in connection with race, language (language families), lineal descent (patriarchal or matriarchal), as well as their economic and ecological particularities, religion, economic relations, natural resources along with the ecological environment all together (also their changes in the course of time!) prove themselves to be directly related to one another everywhere.

An institutionalization of child sexuality occurs within the framework of initiations (mainly in Melanesia, parts of Australia and New Guinea); it resembles the paederastic educational practices of ancient Sparta.28 Sexual contacts between the girl just beginning to menstruate and an adult are to be judged less according to the old European custom of the "jus prima noctis" than as a component of the "rites of passage" from one stage of life to the next.29 In the setting of the category of shamanistic religions there occasionally appear very young individuals as mediums, who feel themselves erotically bound to spirits, and sometimes believe that they are forced by the spirits to become transvestites and therefore, in a state of imagined "sex change", select same-sex marriage partners. Such bondings, however, do not attract social attention, since the shaman's society firmly believes in the supposed sex change. In large parts of India, but also in Indonesia, ancient China and Indochina as well as in the Philippines, there were and are to the present day elements of the cult prostitution of the old civilizations. Admittedly these are nothing but a secularized reminder, and socially marked as prostitution of the poor, in which children are also to be found.30

The sexual behaviour of children and youth in many peoples, such as in the Pacific region, where individuals were especially long-lived by reason of above average environmental circumstances, presents the transition between institutional child sexuality and child sexuality in or as play. Here a regular youth culture tended to develop, in which no adult was allowed to enter or interfere. Usually boys and girls met in their own house, where they were undisturbed among themselves; they tried out friendships and love relationships, and celebrated their own festivals. Such arrangements, actually called "clubs" by European researchers, existed in Polynesia, Central India and Micronesia. Here the "peer group" took over on its own the sexual education of its members.31

The preponderant opinion among primitive peoples is that child sexuality manifests itself differently from that of adults: it is more playful and less goal-directed. Heterosexual and homosexual play among children, but also of adults with children, occurs and is hardly noticed, is smiled at, or is so common that it is a theme of ordinary conversations.32 Sexual contacts between parents and children (especially between mothers and small children), which we would designate as "paedophile" were not rare and are probably still not today in places where the culture of the white man has not become the model or where its influence is in the process of disappearing again.

3.) Connections Between Sexual Drive, Sexual Maturity and Social Maturity in Anthropoid Apes and Human Beings

Chimpanzees become capable of reproduction at about age eight, yet at this point their bodily growth is still not complete and they are inferior to the stronger, older males in their group. This can be a source of frustration for them.33 Before attaining the ability to procreate and conceive, chimpanzee children nonetheless have for years already been sexually mature to the extent that they, through observation and their own experimentation, have learned a lot about sexuality within the group. It is a question here of a cognitive learning that builds on the sexuality available from birth (earlier called "sexual drive") and directs it into the course that is appropriate for their species; in this their bodily experiences are not to be separated from the social ones.

In those primitive peoples that take a neutral, indifferent-tolerant or positive attitude toward sexuality in general and that of children in particular, the circumstances are very similar; we human beings, too, are indeed capable of sexual pleasure and frustration much earlier than the onset of puberty. But puberty (particularly in boys) is not in all societies the end of childhood nor can it be equated with social maturity, i.e., ability to marry. What is decisive is whether the culture in question is simply-structured or complicated, where much must be learned for its complete internalization (i.e., more than a person is able to learn up to puberty) and where social maturity, the sexual maturity as well as the actual ability to procreate, can only follow at a distance that is, at times, very great. in such cases all three abilities (for simple sexuality, for procreation, and for the assumption of the adult role besides) are often falsely put into one, and thus the individual is kept an unseemly long period totally in the stage of childhood. In primitive peoples the response has sometimes been the development of the youth culture mentioned (a type of reaction to which our own youth have come relatively late). Without this possibility of sexual contacts, which are allowed to them although they are not yet in a position to take on the official role of adults, there comes between the adults and the next generation strong interpersonal conflicts that for their entire later life often overshadow the parent-child relationship.


IV. Child Sexuality and Curiosity

So-called "curiosity"34 is presumably to be viewed less as a measure of intelligence than as a disposition that some species of primates have, in the sense of a selective advantage, more than others. Thus the gorilla, which stands physically almost as close to us as the chimpanzee, shows little or no curiosity,35 whereas the curiosity of the chimpanzee appears inexhaustible and our own, the root of all inventions, proceeds continuously from them in a straight line. Strictly speaking, curiosity is an especially intensive and active reaction to an outside stimulant and to that extent also a source of imitation and learning; without the imitation of newly invented types of behaviour there would be no progress. Chimpanzees and (early) humans, in contrast to the much stronger gorilla, had a host of enemies and the more methods they adopted to cope with them, the better they succeeded. Their heightened curiosity offered a real selective advantage for survival, especially because it was unspecific. For the human being today, too, curiosity as an inborn disposition is important for survival.

When a child directs curiosity to its own sexuality, trying it out within its peer group, it thus puts into practice two inborn dispositions: curiosity and the inborn ability for sexual feelings (within the limit of the degree of bodily maturity at the time, of course). in such situations the following reactions of the child are distinguishable: it reacts passively when it either simply observes what is happening around it or when it accepts the sexual actions of others toward itself without resistance or going away, but also without an active cooperation. Active sexual reaction (masturbation) can be directed to its own gratification or this gratification can be sought by and with others who are younger, older or the same age. In both situations curiosity (i.e., imitative learning behaviour) and behaviour directed to obtaining purely sexual gratification are superimposed by that cognitive learning within whose context the respective culture-specific preceptive and forbidden forms of sexual gratification are internalized. Generally children imitate only what interests them: curiosity selectively appears, corresponding to the respective (and certainly highly diverse) motivations of the individual child, and the cognitive result is stored and later differentiated as the age of the children increases. Children actively cooperate in their own socialization; they also do so with regard to the development of their sexuality, even when their behaviour does not go beyond an accepting passivity. How important a child's self-fulfillment is regarding its sexual interests is strikingly shown by at least one fact: both in non-human free-living primates and in those primitive peoples that cultivate a type of rearing that fully accepts child sexuality there are no sexual crimes! On the other hand, in anthropoid apes that grew up in isolation, i.e., without the possibility of learning experiences, wild aggression is found in the attempt to copulate, and in primitive peoples that, like us, have assumed a forbidding, fearful-mistrustful attitude toward sexuality, sexual crimes are thoroughly known.


V. Child Sexuality and the Paedophile Impulse

l.) The Meaning of the "Infant" Model

Already in non-human primates the raising of the young is no longer ensured exclusively on the basis of instinctive rearing behaviour:36 Thus, for example, chimpanzee mothers must have the opportunity to observe how to handle babies in order to know how. Without the possibility of imitating rearing behaviour, they sometimes regard their first child as a foreign object and a puzzling nuisance; they pay no attention to it or even kill it.37 This occurs despite the fact that evolution, in the so-called "infant" model ("Kindchen"-Schema),38 has installed a safety mechanism that makes possible the recognition of a young animal of the same species in need of care and protection, as a reflex, illuminating perception. Corresponding to their high rank on the scale of evolution, however, in anthropoid apes the importance of learning as a factor in the handling of the newcomer is added to instinctive-reflex nurturing. This is demonstrated by the fact that female chimpanzees that grew up alone in cages still sometimes treated their baby correctly at the first attempt, i.e., with loving care. The intensity of the reaction to the infant model must accordingly have been stamped in these primates, only in varying strengths. In general people react to the infant model, in the sense of an encoded stimulus (Schliisselreiz), by heightened acceptance and, where it is a question of living, not pictured beings, by "euphoria, caressing or nurturing actions."39 "Nurturing actions" are primarily to be understood as feeding, warming and protecting. The enormous popularity of certain breeds of dogs (e.g., pug and Pekinese), which were bred on the infant model centuries before it was scientifically discovered as an encoded stimulus for nurturing behaviour, strikingly exhibits the associations under discussion: such dogs have been known and loved for a long time as "baby" substitutes and "lap dogs". Yet not all persons find Disney figures "sweet" or babies or Pekinese "cute"; rather, many find them boring, even decidedly ugly and grotesque. They thus show an ideal of beauty that is exclusively oriented toward adult living beings. They are not child-hating monsters; what is missing is evidently just the ability to still relate to the infant model. But that this, as was mentioned above, can already be found in chimpanzees forces us to the conclusion that the stored instinctual ability of the individual to react in a meaningful way to the encoded stimulus is in humans also no longer generally present. Many lack it entirely, while others still react to it very intensively with euphoria and acts of devotion, which, especially when the reacting individuals are not women, are noted by the society with a certain astonishment. The functioning of the infant model in male primates is very much as important as in mothers; it makes certain that a young animal running around without motherly protection is not attacked by a grown male of the same species, but rather, on the contrary, is protected. The infant model also presents a means to hinder aggression within the species, especially toward young animals.

The "fondling" connected with the reaction to the infant model in non-human primates, and in those primitive peoples that have no tabus relating to this, includes caresses, smelling, licking, "romping", and the well-known "grooming". Touching and manipulation of the genitals of children belong in this context among the acts of devotion,40 because in humans, as a result of the heightened mobility of the hand, "actions" can supplement many of the forms of devotion mentioned above. Their own reaction to the encoded stimulus of the infant model brings to those reacting an intensive experience of satisfaction (the "reward" of nature. so to speak, for the response to the encoded stimulus).

The child, who has already learned after a short time how such forms of behaviour-classified by it, of course, as desirable-are provoked in adults, develops for this purpose an appropriate repertoire of expressions and gestures, and, if new devotion is experienced with their help, there arises in it the feeling of security and primal trust. That exchange of positive actions and feelings, in which genetically fixed reflexive behaviour and social learning are mixed, form the beginning of every bond that promotes social unity. Both young non-human primates and human children still seem to have a vague, instinctive knowledge of the effect of the infant model on adults; therefore they put on a "little child" act so as not to be punished for pranks or to gain attention (i.e., devotion). Here belongs not only the childishly calculated "regressive" behaviour of young anthropoid apes and young children, which is meant to re lease appeasement, attention and heightened devotion, but also the well-known "fooling around" of grown-ups (deliberate stumbling and falling, stuttering, throwing things down, rolling around, talking nonsense): this is nothing but unconscious imitation of childish behaviour and says in a nonverbal but unmistakable way, 'Iam small and dumb and helpless as a baby; why don't you concern yourself about me?!' This extends to the clowning-around of school children, whose bad behaviour, not corresponding to their age, often causes them to appear intellectually deficient, although what they need is not more sense but more devotion from adults.

2.) On the Etiology of the Paedophile impulse

In contrast to the anthropoid apes, we humans are "wanderers between two worlds": one side of our nature is firmly anchored in our genetic inheritance, which we have in common at least with the anthropoid apes and perhaps even with animals standing much lower in the scale of evolution. We are unable to give up this inheritance, since it is unchangeably imprinted in our brain stem and midbrain. The other part of our nature is determined by learning and by freedom from bondage to the "early" parts of the brain, i.e., by the cerebrum and especially by the frontal lobes. Where the impulses of the older and younger parts of the brain prove to be incompatible, there appear social anomalies41 - collective neuroses as well as conflicts within the species, i.e., wars, as well as institutions such as the inquisition, concentration camps, etc. In the West paedophiles have become the victims of such a collective neurosis, whose culturally determined cause lies in our traditional hatred, fed from multiple sources, of the body and thereby of sex.

Paedophiles who seek to define and describe the object of their longing often reproduce the infant model with striking sureness.42 And as conclusion to what has been presented so far, let us assert the theory-at least as a topic for discussion-that the paedophile impulse is the result of a still unbroken spontaneous and intensive reaction-which has become rare, certainly-to the infant model, an encoded stimulus originating in the midbrain, such as may have been intrinsic to many more people in earlier epochs. Paedophiles emphasize again and again that sexuality is not the constituent factor in their relationships with children, but rather only one-important, to be sure-among numerous other and not less important ones. They further declare that in their opinion 'many people have an interest in paedophilia, but repress it'. This observation may be true within limits, but the conclusion is false: my opinion is rather that many people do indeed still react impulsively and intensely to the infant model (otherwise it would doubtless not be so popular in advertising!), but just no longer quite as strongly as the paedophile. Thus it is easy for these people to do without the sexual component of their contact with children, which in truth does not represent something as unique and noteworthy as it appears to us, but rather has acquired this character only through the sexual fear that the basic body-hating pattern of our culture produces. People can do without this component in their contact with children, but one could also place special value upon it, indeed see it as an altogether important value. The moralistic judgement against paedophilia is always "learned", is a cerebral matter.43

Healthy children react with curiosity to everything that happens in their environment. Since they are interested in their own socialization, which includes becoming acquainted with their own sexuality and the sexual feelings of others, then in child-adult contacts, sexual content also is inevitably included, wherever it is not made tabu. Sexuality must be learned: that is one reason why children are interested in it, and children prefer to learn from someone who loves them. To this extent one would think that the natural teachers for this would be the child's own parents, and in anthropoid apes and some primitive peoples this is indeed the case. Parental introductions to sexuality, however, are never the beginning of a lifelong sexual relationship; on the contrary they have an absolutely temporary character. The fact is worth noting that paedophile child-adult contacts correspond to parental introductions to sexuality in that they tend to end with the puberty of the child and, in addition, that the paedophile can have equally strong emotional relationships with several children during the same period of time. Moreover, rounding out the picture is the circumstance, denied by most people who pass judgement, that for the paedophile, the sexuality of the child with whom he wishes to have contact is only of secondary interest.

3) The Fundamental Nonaggressiveness of Paedophile Relationships

Since the infant model arouses nurturing devotion and forms an unalterable basis for nonaggressiveness, paedophile contacts must by their nature be free of force. If they are not, then they are not paedophile. Those who force a child to sexual contact belong to a category of pseudo-paedophiles who are just as truly criminal as a man who rapes a grown woman. But sexual contact by force is not attractive for paedophiles. The widespread opinion, where such a relationship is discovered, that the paedophile must have "forced" the child into sexuality, reproduces once again the Western ideology of a fundamental child "innocence" or "purity" that has long since been disproved by psychology. In truth, the child may often even be the sexual initiator with an adult in whom, by way of exception, the child does not notice the usual tabu toward all questions about sex. Declarations by paedophiles in this connection are thus by no means to be evaluated as defensive statements. Likewise, the often expressed conviction that children are "seduced" to sexuality is to be seen as pure nonsense. when one takes cognizance of the basic physiological endowment of sexual feelings already in the small child. One can "seduce" someone to sexuality just as little as to eating or drinking. Paedophile relationships also constitute no inevitable power relationship of the adult over the child: they establish on the contrary a seldom seen camaraderie between the personality of the child and that of the adult, within whose system of reference each takes the other seriously. Where sexuality with children is forbidden, as it is with us, there can be no talk of any kind of power of the adult, since the child can denounce him at any time to anyone, something which brings with it truly existence-threatening consequences for the adult.

Contrary to the customary opinion, sexual murders of children are extremely rare, but even in such shocking cases a distinction must be made between sadism and actions motivated by a fear of discovery. In the cultural domain paedophiles are considered criminal no matter whether their contacts with children are friendly and loving or are extremely harmful. It is this criminalization that brings with it most of the consequences that finally must be judged negative for the paedophile as well as for the child in question. Paedophiles who do not constantly maintain a self-awareness and an examination of the child's reactions are naive. Nevertheless their environment has at some time or another unmistakably inculcated into both partners that sex is something nasty and bad. Thus they often have feelings of guilt-all the more serious when in fact nothing happened in the contact that the partners did not experienced as positive.

If force comes into play, then the intimate contact of an adult with a child acts exclusively to frighten the child and can lead to lifelong harm. Ironically, it is often overlooked that in the cases of sexual contact with children often presented as being particularly horrible, the force used is in the first place the force of authority: the perpetrators are fathers, stepfathers, older brothers, uncles, neighbors-precisely those people whom children customarily find themselves forced to obey. The forced sexual contact is therefore interpreted by the child as a form of rearing, to which the child must obediently submit. The paedophile impulse, like every other human impulse, runs the danger of being perverted, but the perversion does not lie in the impulse itself, certainly, but rather in its interpretation. Where sex between older and younger. even between parents and children, is not made tabu, it is not grounds for shame, mutual accusations of seduction, lies or force of various kinds. Examples of this are found in the pre-Aryan races of India, the Kighiz, in Micronesia and the Malay-Indonesian region. Are the aborigines of India or the members of the Malay family of peoples therefore not human? The question is rhetorical; I only want to emphasize one last time that our Western fear of paedophile contacts is determined above all by the sexual tabu as such.


VI. Problems of Research on Paedophilia

The start given in this essay to a discussion illuminating the etiology of the paedophile impulse may need enlarging, may be one-sided or false. One is left, however, with nothing more than theories about it, for what would be needed here to clarify the remaining questions are international empirical researches, ranging over many fields, of a social-psychological nature.44 For us (in the Federal Republic of Germany) these are impossible at the moment, for whoever investigates nonaggressive paedophile contacts must necessarily be actively occupied with people who are living out the paedophile impulse, and with their child partners. But the information that is thereby obtained must, by law, be reported to the responsible state's attorney, since under German law paedophilia belongs to those crimes that everyone must denounce if they hear of it. The exception of professional confidentiality, as with doctors and pastors, does not exist for social researchers. An attorney of my acquaintance commented on the situation thus: -You had better not begin such a project. The state would not be able to avoid demanding that you turn over the names and addresses of your informants so as to begin prosecution. And you can not refuse, otherwise you would be imprisoned to force you."

In view of this absurd situation, I argue that sociologists and psychologists, too, who wish to undertake empirical work on the behaviour, development, personality profile, etc., of the "typical paedophile", also be juridically released from the duty of denouncing our informants. As Edward Brongersma has written, the literature (and not least the expert opinions given in the courts) is stamped with conceptions of paedophilia and paedophiles that are false and have their ideological origin in the previous century.45 Until more valid analyses exist, this will not and cannot change; but how is it to be changed, if for the researcher the effort to make a better analysis is bound up with the danger of being robbed of one's freedom? Here closes a vicious circle, whose victims are not only paedophiles, but also the behavioral sciences.

Paedophilia is the least investigated scientifically of all sexual "deviations". This is so because in it the general sexual tabu still has the most intensive effect. With the notorious imputation that every paedophile contact is forced, completely prejudiced public opinion prevents a more realistic view of things: the prejudice itself hinders its dissolution and is able to evoke in those involved and in outsiders further insecurity, fears, and even actually punishable, reprehensible acts. One is reminded of the old German legal adage: "False laws ripen into genuine crimes."



Editor's Note:

Dr. Gisela Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg originally worked as a telex and telephone operator. She returned to complete high-school studies as an admit, then received her M. A. and Ph. D. degrees from Bonn, studying ethnology, sociology, comparative religion and psychology. She has long been active in political organizations, journalism and special education. Her publications in the areas of ethnology and sexology include Tabu Homosexualitat (1978), Mannbarkeitsriten: Zur institutionellen Paderastie bei Papuas und Melanesiern (1980), and Der Weibmann: kultische Geschlechtswandel im Schamanism (1984).


Notes:

1. An abridged version of this article was published as Der padophile Impuls. Wie lernt ein junger Mensch Sexualitdt?" in Liebe, Sexualitat und soziale Mythen (Der Monat neue Folge) 295, 1984, pp. 175192.
2. Translated from the German by Dr. Hubert Kennedy.
3. A more extensive presentation of this connection is in Gisela Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg, Homosexualitat. Die Geschichte eines Vorurteils (Frankfurt/M., 1978), pp. 196ff.
4. In places in jan van Ussel, Sexualunterdackung (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1970).
5. Examples in Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg, op. cit., pp. 196-228, 265ff.
6. JJ. Rousseau, Emile oder Uber die Erziehung (Paderborn, 1978) pp. 9, 216ff.
7. See Frits Bernard, Padophilie. Von der Liebe mit Kindern (Lollar, 1978), esp. pp. 53-4.
8. Statements on this in Hans Glese, "Das andere Geschlecht", in Hans Giese and V.E. v. Gebsattel, eds., Psychopathologie der Sexualitat (Stuttgart, 1962), are probably still valid today, as numerous articles on the subject in the journal Sexualpadagogik show.
9. The much loved equation of human behaviour with that of rats ("rat-ology") of American psychologists in the ammal-human comparisons of the 1950's is completely unsuited to a clarification of the present question, since these animals are much too distant from us in the scale of evolution.
10. Easily obtainable works on research into animal and human behaviour include the following, a number of which are not directly connected with the theme of this essay but which provide general background to the topic: (Ed. Note: Titles of English translations or originals, where known to us, aregiven after the German title; however, page references arefor the German edition.) Geoffrey H. Bourne and Maury Cohen, Die sanften Riesen. Gorillas-Legende und Wirklichkeit. Ergebnisse de Verhaltensforschung (Munchen, 1977), in English, The Gentle Giants: The Gorilla Story (New York, 1975); Stella Brewer, Die Affenschule. Neue Wege der Wildtielforschung (Wien/Hamburg, 1978); Vitus B. Drascher, Diefreundliche Bestie. Neueste Forschungen aber das Tier-Verhalten (Oldenberg/ Hamburg, 1968), in English, The Friendly Beasts (New York, 1971); Irendus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Liebe und Hass. Zu Naturgeschichte elementarer Verhaltensweisen (Miinchen, 1971), in English, Love and Hate: the Natural History of Basic Behaviour Patterns (London, 1971); Alison jolly, Die Entwicklung des Primatenverhaltens (Stuttgart, 1975), in English, The Evolution of Primate Behaviour (New York, 1972); G. Kurth and Iren~ius Eibl-Eibesfeldt (eds.), Hominisation und Verhalten (Stuttgart, 1975); jane van Lawick-Goodall, Wilde Schimpansen. 10jahre Verhaltensforschlung am Gombe-Strom (Reinbek bel Hamburg, 1975), in English, In the Shadow ofMan (New York, 1971); Eugene Marals, Die Seele des Affen. Beobachtungen aber das Verhalten unserer engsten Seelenverwandten (Esslingen, 1973), in English, The Soul of the Ape (New York, 1969); Paul Overhage, Der Affe in dir. Vom tierischen und menschilichen Verhalten (Frankfurt, 1972); George B. Schaller, Unsere nachsten Verwandten (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1968), in English, The Year of the Gorilla (London, 1965); Walter Baumgairtel, Unter Gorillas. Erlelmisse auf freier Wildbahn (Frankfurt, 1979); Grzimeks Tierleben, Sjugetiere 1 (MUnchen, 1979), esp. chapters 2022; Edouard L. Bon6 and Louvain-La-Neuve, "Hominisation in der Palaiontologie", in Edouard L. Bon6 et al. (eds.), Aspekte der Hominisation (Freiburg/Miinchen, 1978).
11. jolly, op. cit., summarizes the concept of "learning" on pp. 313 and 288E.
12. Clellan S. Ford and Frank A. Beach, Das Sexualverhalten von Mensch und Tier (Berlin, 1960), p. 294ff., in English, Patterns of Sexual Behaviour (New York, 1951).
13. jolly, op. cit., pp. 217, 28895.
14. Kurth and Eibl-Eibesfeld, op. cit., p. 383; Peter Heintz, Soziale Vorurteile (K61n, 1957), p. 100; Theodore Newcomb, Sozialpsychologie (Meisenheim am Glan, 1957), p. 561: "Even nonexistent things, such as ghosts, for example, are in a social sense truly present for the members of every group that assumes their presence and are agreed on it." In English, Social Psychology, (New York, 1950).
15. jolly, op. cit., pp. 150, 168. 16. Ibid., pp. 115,118,122,143, 148, 151, 168ff.
17. Ford and Beach, op. cit., pp. 294ff.
18. Ford and Beach, op. cit.' pp. 293ff., jolly, op. cit.' PP. 173ff, 112-134.
19. on the definition of the concept see jolly, o p. cit., pp. 1-5; monkeys and human beings belong to the primates.
20. H. Heckhausen, "Einfliisse auf die Motivationsgenese in Theo. Herman (ed.), Psychologie der Erziehungss tile (G6ttingen, 1966).
21. jolly, op. cit., pp. 112-134; Ford and Beach, op. cit., pp. 293E.
22. jolly, op. cit., pp. 213, 172 and passim.
23. The error is stubbornly maintained; it is unscientific and ethnocentric. Different views prevail in the various research disciplines on just where the dividing line between beasts and human beings is to be drawn; at the latest, the beginning of culture is equated with the human domestication of fire, which Peking man already knew. For an in-depth study of the whole complex of the acquisition of culture see Ute HolzkampOsterkamp, Grundlagen der psychologischen Motivationsforschung, vols. 1-2 (Frankfurt/M., 1977, 1978); see also Volker Schurig, Naturgeschichte des Psychischen. Lernen und Abstraktionsleistungen bei Tieren (Frankfurt/M., 1975) and by the same author, Die Entstehung des Bewusstseins (Frankfurt/M., 1976).
24. Ford and Beach, op. cit., pp. 213ff.
25. Ibid., pp. 211ff. 26. Ibid., pp. 203ff. 27. Examples in N.M. Penzer, The Ocean of Story, vol. III, Appendix II (London, 1925).
28. See my ethno-historical study Mannbarkeitsriten (Berlin, 1980) and the important work of Harald Patzer, "Die griechische Knaberiliebe", in Sitzungsberichte d. wissenschaftl. Ges. an d. johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universitdt, FrankfurtIM., vol. 18, tir. 1 (Wiesbaden, 1982).
29. See A. van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (Chicago, 1960).
30. Examples in my essay "Homosexualict und Transvestition im Schamanismus Anthropos 65 (1970), pp. 189ff; shocking descriptions from a more recent time are in Lawrence Durrell, Das AlexandriaQuartett (Reinbek bei Hamburg,1977).
31. Examples in Robert Brain, Freunde und Liebende. Zwischenmenschliche Beziehungen im Kulturvergleich (Frankfurt/M_ 1976), p. 292ff., in English, Friends and Lovers, (New York, 1976).
32. Ford and Beach, op. cit., pp. 178ff, 213ff.
33. See the analysis of the behaviour of half-grown male chimpanzees in jane van Lawick-Goodall The Behaviour of the Chimpanzee-, in Kurth and Eibl-Eibesfeldt, op. cit., P. 11Off.
34. Theconnections between curiosity and sexual exploration of the self and others are-probably as a result of the old sexual tabus-largely unexplored. The important publication of Harry Fowler, Curiosity and Exploratory Behaviour (New York, 1985), treats the theme on pp. 74ff, with a few references to further reading in the literature; see also jolly, op. cit., pp. 282E.
35. See Kurth and Elbl-Eibesfeld, op. cit., pp. 14ff, jolly, op. cit., pp. 123ff, 146; for gorillas there was probably, after a period in which both tree and savannah living was usual and the importance of visual observations increased, a forced withdrawal into the forest that was caused by the more intelligent prehominids that have died out in the meantime. Although gorillas in captivity readily eat the same things as chimpanzees, in freedom they only cat twenty different kinds of plants, whereas the feeding repertoire of the chimpanzee includes more than two hundred sources: curiosity promotes discoveries that make life easier.
36. One can no longer speak today with a good scientific conscience of purely instinctual nurturing behaviour in mammals; this is admissible, however, in birds and reptiles, as well as species that are below them on the evolutionary scale.
37. Examples in Grzimeks Tierleben, vol. 1, Sdugetiere, p. 533. 38. jolly, op. cit., pp. 185-88, 194.
39. For a definition of the concept see Peter Meyer, Lexikon der Verhaltenskunde (Paderbon, 1976), p. 104: "Childish contours and proportions of the skull arouse euphoria, caressing or nurturing behaviour in human beings (SchRisselreiz) 51 ; "Childish contours and proportions (especially of the face) and in a wider sense also childish sounds and movements of individuals of the same or a different species, which arouse the nurturing drive of adults."
40. jolly, op. cit., pp. 121, 157; Ford and Beach, op. cit.' pp. 293ff.
41. On this concept, see Werner Fuchs (ed.), Lexikon zur Soziologie (Opladen, 1973), p. 38: "The breakdown of cultural order in the form of a split in the culturally given goals and values on the one hand and the socially allowed possibility of reaching these goals on the other. The situation of anomaly exerts in the individual a pressure toward deviant behaviour and is overcome through the various forms of adjustment according to the recognition or rejection of the cultural goals and values or the means allowed." (Defined following RX. Merton, who has been especially concerned with the anomalous situation of marginal social groups.)
42. See Uwe Kroll, "Objekt meiner Schnsucht", Zitty, tir. 26 (Berlin, 1979), reprinted in Joachirn S. Holimatin (ed.) Padophilie heute (Frankfurt/Berlin, 1980), pp. 155E. It is also significant in this connection that paedophiles only experience sexually stimulating pictures of young persons as attractive if the faces of those pictured appear "happy" or "beaming".
43. On the connection between the development of the brain in human beings and the-at least partial- "liberation- of the higher (i.e., later developed) parts of the brain from the tyranny of the brain stem and midbrain see the excellent newer research interpretations of Gordon Rattray Taylor, Die Geburt des Geistes (Frankfurt/M., 1982), in English, The Natural History of the Mind (New York, 1981), and Karl R. Popper and John C. Eccles, Das Ich und sein Gehirn (Miinchen/Zii rich, 1982), in English, The Self and Its Brain (New York, 1977).
44. Here may be mentioned the works of Dr. Frits Bernard and Dr. Edward Brongersmal as well as the research by Michael Baurmann. Newer works from abroad may also be named: Theo Sandfort, Sexual Aspect of Paedophile Relations (Amsterdam, 1982) and Boys on their Contacts with Men (New York and Amsterdam, 1987); L.L. Constantine and Floyd Martinson, Children and Sex: New Findings, New Perspectives (Boston, 1981).
45. Edward Brongersma, "Die Rechtsposition des Padophilen", Monatsschift fa, Kriminology und Strafrechtsreform 63, nr. 2 (1980). See, for example, the presentation in the psychiatric textbook, Jorg Weitbrecht, Psychiatrie im Crundriss (Berlin/G6ttingen/Heidelberg, 1983) where, on pp. 143, paedophilia, homosexuality, bisexuality, exhibitionism, voyeurism and other "perversions" are still traced back to "defective maturation from so-called constitutional reasons or through exogenous, environmental impressions and hindrances to maturity, or both together. " And an entirely new vocabulary has recently been created in the U.S.A. for that behaviour which is designated by us in the Federal Republic of Germany as -sexually deviant-, namely "paraphilia", defined by Dr. John Money as "anerotic" sexual syndrome in which a person is reiteratively responsive to and dependent on atypical or forbidden stimulus imagery, in fantasy or in practice, for initiation and maintenance of erotic-sexual arousal and achievement or facilitation of orgasm" (quoted in Pan, m-. 12 (Amsterdam, 1982), p. 44-5). Having such "atypical" and/or -forbidden- thoughts is suggested to be identical with sickness C'syndrome"): here the---moral insanity" of the 18th and 19th centuries celebrates a shocking resurrection.

[RoosterDance]

Interview: Gisela Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg

Dr. Gisela Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg holds doctorates in comparative religion and ethnology. She has worked as a journalist and is the author of several works in the field of ethno-sexology. She has written about transvesticism, transsexualism, and prejudices and fears concerning AIDS. Her studies also include cross-cultural analyses of institutionalized paedophilia. After reading her article, "The Paedophile Impulse" (Paidika, vol. 1, nr. 3), we visited her to discuss her ideas about intergenerational relationships and cultural attitudes concerning paedophilia.


Marjan Sax and Sjuul Deckwitz: In the discussions about relationships between grown-ups and minors, the age of the minor always plays an important role. What are your thoughts on the age question? Do you consider it so important?

Gisela Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg: Certainly the age question is important. In order to understand it we must first make a clear distinction between biological maturity and social maturity. They are almost always considered as distinct from one another. Sometimes, however, they are very emphatically linked together for polemical or moral reasons.

Boys are considered biologically mature, that is, no longer children, when orgasm with ejaculation is possible. With girls, the onset of the first menses is an even clearer indication. Just when this occurs, in either boys or girls, is dependent on factors that still have not been completely researched. It is generally accepted that people from warmer climates, the Mediterranean region for example, are biologically mature earlier than those from the colder, northern regions.

From at least the turn of the century we've known that in middle and northern Europe the first menstruation of girls took place as early as twelve. Some researchers have conjectured that artificial light, which is, in a way, a form of artificial sunbathing and is now common everywhere, influences not just the growth rate of individuals but their biological maturation rate as well. Improved nutrition, especially the increased intake of vitamins, could also influence the advance of biological maturity. We may not know the decisive reasons for early maturation of both sexes in Europe but the fact that it is early isn't disputed anymore.

These biological findings are often ignored in discussions regarding the social maturity of children as they grow into adolescence. Social maturity usually means the age at which children are considered by their individual societies to be adult. In middle and northern Protestant European regions the custom survived into modem times that after Confirmation-which usually took place at age fourteen or fifteen-the child officially became an adult. Confirmation meant becoming an adult member of the church. It was a precondition for marriage. Only after it were girls considered marriageable, provided a suitor could be found who was wealthy enough to afford the costs of the new household. It signalled the onset of social maturity and was obviously identical with financial independence or, as the case may be, the power to dispose of inherited wealth.

Social maturity is usually defined as "capable of being responsible for oneself It should be viewed as separate from marriage ties. When individuals were judged, for whatever reason, to be incapable of taking this responsibility, they were deemed unfit for marriage, regardless of whether they were at that time an adult or a child.

In antiquity, the Roman Catholic Church in southern European regions, perhaps in recognition of early maturation, fixed the marriage age for girls at twelve and for boys at fourteen. In fact, many such marriages of what we would consider by today's standards as extremely young partners were not merely contracted, but also consummated. In France the canonical marriage age was not abolished until Napoleon raised the legal age. The other European states followed suit.

At present, that moment of social maturity, when people can financially stand on their own feet, is higher than ever before. In some academic disciplines, for example, a person might be closer to forty than to thirty before receiving a doctorate.

You have to understand these factors before you can properly understand the importance of age in the discussion about intergenerational relationships.

How do biological and social maturity relate then to intergenerational relationships?

I would say that the separation of biological from social maturity is the essential cause of the present generational conflict. The split stirs up so much anxiety and confusion that it is easy for the moral crusaders to rally opinion against "child corrupters." In their oratory even sixteen year old boys, tall as trees, and teenage girls, long into their child-bearing years and whose voluptuous figures adorn the front covers of magazines, are described as "children being corrupted."

You say that the Protestant and Catholic churches had an influence on the social understanding of age, and even the law. In your article, "The Paedophile Impulse, " in Paidika Issue 3, you suggest that the way we think about sexuality, and the way it is regarded in society, is strongly influenced by Christianity. Religion seems to be an important theme for you. Could you elaborate on your view for us?

In contrast to many primitive people and the inhabitants of ancient non-European empires, we live in a civilization that is guilt ridden about sexuality. Christianity teaches that all evil-that is, original sin-came into the world through the fall in the Garden of Eden. This "evil" came to be understood not as the transgression of a prohibition. Rather, the evil resulted from the sexual intercourse practiced for the first time by the "first human couple." In other words: it is sex that makes one evil. Sex is the root of all evil.

The apostle Paul was responsible for the transformation of the Garden of Eden story. He created for himself a memorial with a long lasting effect. He preached that the Fall brought death into the world. "The wages of sin is death," and sin was sex. The doctrine of original sin was his: every one at birth inherited the continuing effect of the first evil act. We could only be redeemed from original sin by Christian Baptism.

The doctrine of original sin was especially fascinating to the church father Augustine. Although Christianity "redeemed" it by baptism, Augustine relativized Redemption, that is divested it of universality, by saying it was presumptuous to believe that everyone would be saved. Despite baptism we can never be certain of God's grace and love. His main argument is that we continually sin sexually. Sexuality is the source of all earthly sorrows, of death itself. Lust, concupiscence of the flesh, is the key to Augustine's theology.

Augustine's elaboration of the doctrine of original sin and the negative value he ascribes to sexuality heavily influenced St. Thomas Aquinas, who's enmity to sexuality was no less than Augustine's or Paul's. Since the writings of the ancient Greeks have been rediscovered in the meantime, we can now see that Aquinas added a lot of confused, pre-scientific ideas about man and woman, procreation and life, to his theology, most of which he had extrapolated from the works of Aristotle.

The trio Paul-Augusdne-Thomas has distorted the Christian attitude towards sexuality to such an extent that what was meant as a religion of love has been reduced to a catalog of rules that permit only certain sexual acts within marriage and forbid all others. The consequences of this attitude are borne by us today.

The timid attempts in recent times to affirm sexuality as a good gift of God, and not something diabolic, do not find an echo in the churches. Popular opinion still considers sex somewhat wicked, fraught with lies, and circumscribed by taboos. The ends of sex are not religious. A society which finds sexuality so questionable must naturally feel strong doubts about whether something so dubious should be permitted to children, or-horrible thought!-be taught to children by adults. From a social perspective the fear of paedophilia can be seen simply as a sexual fear.

Although, in general, Western Europeans no longer feel themselves bound by the laws of Christianity, they do feel, on the basis of their own socialization in a Christian culture, that one should not take sex too lightly. It is a vague emotion which one occasionally senses, but which one personally no longer tends to follow unconditionally. This vaguely negative attitude is, however, precisely what is passed on to children. The message is, "Sex is dangerous." They are burdened with an attitude that they only rid themselves of by in turn passing it on to their children. And sex education, at least in Germany, normally so zealous when it comes to exposing religious prejudices, fails to expose this deepest of all the religious prejudices.

If "sex is dangerous "for children, isn't the converse the notion that children are innocent? Has the idea of the innocence of children, discussed so much since the Enlightenment, also added to the prohibition of sexuality for children?

According to Rousseau, children issue "pure from the hand of God" and as long as possible, preferably until they are eighteen, they should remain "pure." Of course, purity here means free from any sexuality, what is known as "the state of innocence." The expression, "God-given purity of the child," is new and thoroughly modem.

The Middle Ages emphasized original sin. It was the inherited human burden for everyone, even newborn infants. Rousseau, reacting to this, preached the opposite. Pure by nature, pure at birth, children are able to retain this heavenly innocence for a long time. Sexual feelings and drives are not innate, they are brought to them from the outside, from the evil world of adults, a secularized version of the Garden of Eden myth.

The good, loving, pure, and innocent child, free of all sexual drives, was the child every man and woman wished to have. To drive out sexual stirrings from children who might not fit this ideal picture, hard discipline, hunger, and beatings were recommended and used. Nowadays, sexual pedagogy, influenced by this "discipline pedagogy," until quite recently sought to extend its influence over a wider and wider range of individuals by continually advancing the definition of childhood to a later and later age. Now, we consider biologically mature young people to be "adolescents," that is no longer children.

In the discussion of paedophilia, this advancing of age reaches absurd proportions. When we speak about paedophilia it should be about the form that really deserves its name, aimed as it is towards sex with pre-pubescent children. Of course, I'm not speaking here about incest, which for social reasons I think should be dealt with in a separate manner.

These ideas about sexuality and children, are they different in non-Christian, non-Western cultures?

As far as sexuality in general goes, well we could say that everything is contained in the panorama of humanity. If we look at non-Western cultures we find that in many of these cultures, the sexual stimulation of children, even infants, occurs. It is usually treated as something irrelevant, as another native custom. At the same time there are also population groups that consider such things to be as harmful and pedagogically wrong as we do.

In Micronesia and some regions of the subcontinent of India, free sexual contacts were allowed in the so-called adolescent "club houses, in which the village boys slept from their sixth year until marriage. Verrier Elwin writes about it in his book about the Murias of India. The initiation of small children into a sexual life by older adolescents was the rule, conduct we would call paedophile. Sexual contacts between adult women and very young boys was especially frequent in Australia. Lesbian contacts, which only reached European cars through rumor, are said to have made up part of the initiation of girls in wide parts of Africa, whose explicit goal was the preparation, also bodily, of girls for marriage. These contacts were not only permitted by the societies, but were considered a normal part of daily life. There was no social stigmatization, and therefore no individual psychic injury. Psychic injury might rather have occurred if the children had been excluded, for example, from the "club house" activities.

Actions we classify as sexual, and reject as being paedophile-sexual play, masturbation of little boys or even nursing infants, or clitoral stimulation of immature girls-were often carried out by older adolescents or adults, sometimes even by their own parents. The young girls' participation took place mostly in the seclusion of their own households and therefore was only noticed by European researchers if these acts occurred publicly.

Observations about cross-cultural sexual phenomenon have often shocked European ethnologists. In their zealous search for so-called "natural sexual behavior" (which they imagined would best be found preserved among the "primitives"), they regularly came away empty-handed. The first European ethnologists who studied sexual practices different or opposite from ours, considered these peoples less than human and their customs atrocious. Sexuality among these so-called primitive cultures that was "deviant" according to European standards was considered animal. This was, of course, an extremely racist train of thought. It was not science: it was ideology.

The followers of Rousseau at the same time also created an ideology, of the "natural innocence" of people, you know, "the Noble Savage." They tried to find proof for their theories among non-European peoples, and did. There is a well known phenomenon we could call selective perception. That is, you see what you want to see, you see proofs where you want to see proofs. In other words, they were blind to facts and observations that might have contradicted their theories. When they got to know the peoples they were studying better, they were usually disappointed. The noble savage was just as much a theoretical, Western construct as the animal savage.

If the sexual customs of non-Westem peoples can give us anything at all, it is a deepened insight into the enormous range of possibilities for human sexual behavior. Cross-cultural studies can also give us an increased knowledge of the situationally-determined plasticity of the sexuality of our own species.

You mentioned in passing that incest was a totally separate discussion. You have, however, also indicated that intergenerational sexuality and incest in nonWestern cultures sometimes cross. Do you see any connection in our own society between a relationship of an older woman with a minor and an incestuous relationship?

There are many factors you have to take into consideration when you look at the relationships between women and minors in our society. There is for example the relationship between an older woman and a younger boy. In the French newspaper Liberation of 21 October 1979 there was a letter from a woman, signed "Noelle," who asked: "Am I the only woman who loves little boys?" Noelle candidly describes her sexual contact with a ten-year-old boy. I can read it to you-I have it here.

She writes: "Am I the only one who has a ten-year-old 'lover.' I say 'lover' because between us there is obviously nothing like a mother-child relationship. It is a sensual, absolutely bodily relationship. What I love in Stephen is not the picture of some kind of 'childish innocence,' which he has not played for a long time. I love his mouth, his laugh, the movement of his fingers, his arse, and that tidbit which, each time under a different name, he offers to my mouth and which always has the same taste of moonstone."

I don't know the reaction to Noelle's letter, but I am assuming that she is by no means the only woman who makes the "facts of life" known in a nice way to very young boys.

The boy was in a sense privileged to be introduced to love by an adult, experienced, and loving woman. Such preferential treatment was granted in earlier times mostly to the sons of the rich. In their capacities as scions of the bourgeoisie, fathers and uncles took care that growing boys were well informed about and even introduced to heterosexual sex. They were especially instructed in how to protect themselves from venereal diseases. In Germany there were women called 'Lebedamen,' well educated prostitutes, who specialized in such initiations.

This kind of "introduction into love" should be strongly distinguished from a incestuous relationship between, for example, a mother and a son. In our culture incest is strongly condemned and forbidden. Because of the social condemnation (after all it is thought to be very offensive socially), an incestuous relationship can have grave effects on a child: it can, for example, put a child into a situation in which he has no practical way out. An atmosphere of lies, fear, uncertainty, and distorted ideas about sexual relationships does not foster either wholesome sexual or social development.

It is a widespread misconception that incest and paedophilia are related or even identical phenomena. This is not the case. Incest can be problematic as well when it concerns two biological adults. Paedophile contacts are not usually incestuous as well. Confusing these two very different phenomena with one another prevents the realistic analysis of either of them.



Editors' Note:
The author has kindly supplied us with a list of further readings into topics discussed in the interview. We have added further writings on intergenerational relationships by Dr. Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg.

Translated from German by Dr. Hubert Kennedy


Bibliography:
Brain, Robert. Freunde und Liebende. Zwischenmenschliche Beziehungen im Kulturvergleich. Frankfurt: Verlag Goverts, 1978.
Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg, Gisela. See articles: "Ethnology, 11 "Transvestism," "Transsexuality," "Sodomy," "Paederasty," "Incest," "Female Bisexuality." In: Siegfried Rudolf Dunde (Ed.), Handbuch Sexualitdt. Weinheim: Deutscher Studienverlag, 1991
Bleibtrem-Ehrenberg, Gisela. Mannbarkeitsritten. Zur institutionellen Paderastie bei Papuas und Melanesiern. Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1980.
Bleibtrem-Ehrenberg, Gisela. "The Paedophile Impulse: Toward the Development of an Etiology of Child-Adult Sexual Contacts from an Ethological and Ethnological Perspective." Paidika: The Journal of Paedophilia. Vol. 1, nr. 3, Winter, 1988, pp. 22-36.
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