saquigley@watdaisy.UUCP (Sophie Quigley) (01/22/84)
I find the idea of "consenting" children very hard to swallow. My first sexual experience as a consenting person happened to me when I was 11. I was starting to have breasts and was very proud of them and use to parade naked around the house even when friends were around. One day, I did this in front of a 21 year old "man" who was an old friend of the family and who I had a crush on at the time. Later on in the evening, I sat amorously on his lap wearing a very loose robe and only my underwear. He started fondling my breasts, something which I enjoyed deeply; he noticed this and moved on to my stomach and then slipped his hand in my underwear. At that point, I got very scared, pushed him away, and ran and locked myself in my bedroom. For some reason, I pushed this out of my mind so well that the next time I remembered this incident was when I was 17. In between, I had a few boyfriends. I would let them fondle my breasts but I never felt any pleasure out of this. I was also overcame by a sort of panic whenever I felt they were getting too close to my abdomen. It was only when I turned 17 and met somebody I felt I wanted to have sex with that I started slowly remembering what had happened to me when I was eleven. I am not asking for sympathy, as I do not think I have been victimised in any way, but I am just trying to put across the point that children and adults are very different emotionally. Children do have very strong sexual urges, but the urges are very different from those of adults. I think that there is a very big danger when adults start projecting their own feelings on children, which is something this friend of ours did. For me childhood and adolescence were periods of very troubled emotions, and the children I have known since seem to go through similar troubled periods. I think adults should be responsible enough to recognise this and to realise that the feelings in a children are children's feelings which may look like adult feelings on the surface, but are very different. Children are on the fringe of the adult world. They are spectators and they learn about it slowly; the way to do this is to try on different adult roles, but they are trying, searching, and it is very important that they be allowed to do this and be allowed to also be children, which is something that will be denied to them if they are assumed to be adults just because they occasionally act this way. What happens to people as children is very important. I believe that a lot of people's emotional problems come from childhood experiences, simply because as children we are more vulnerable than we are later on. All this to say that adults should be very careful with the way they treat children. This is especially true of sex. Children do have sexual urges, but this does not necessarily mean that they want to have sex even if they act like they do and if they do, it doesn't mean that they want to have the same kind of sex you think they want to have, and if they do, then you cannot be sure of what this will do to them. I know this by experience. Sex is very important stuff and it affects people very much, much more than one thinks it will, and not necessarily the way you expect it will. I think that sex is better if left between emotional equals. if you are concerned with children's right to sex, then let them have sex with other children, that is probably the best you can do for them. I am basing my opinion of children on what I remember life to be like as one, and on the children I see around me as well as what my mother has told me about the children she encounters in the school where she teaches. My early sexual experience was rather benign from an adult point of view, but it was pretty important to me since I managed to block it out of my memory for a few years, and it has affected me in ways I understand now. It might also have affected me in other ways I am not aware of, who knows? I think I've overcame most of it, but somebody else might not have. If I had been somebody else or if he had been somebody else, who knows what might have happened? I guess my basic line is, if you want to have sex with children, don't, and if they want to have sex with you and so do you and you do, well remember, what you are doing could affect that other person much more than you think it will.