The Age of Consent and Industrialism

Freud’s theory of infantile sexuality must be seen as an integral part of a broader developmental theory of human personality. 100 years ago Freud postulated that the moment the infant comes out of the womb, it is erotic. It attains erotic stimulation through sucking, in the early stages, what is deemed as the oral fixation period. The family drama we refer to as the Oedipus complex presupposes that at the age of five and below the child can experience intense psychosexual trauma resulting in neuroses later in life.

Whether or not you agree with Freud’s theory, you cannot disagree with the fact that our society’s conception of sexual maturity is far removed from the time at which the body is sexually mature, that is puberty. After the industrial era, the age of consent was predicated, not on puberty, but on an abstracted concept of bourgeois job readiness.

Steven Angelidies argues in his essay “The Emergence of the Pedophile in the Twentieth Century” before the 1970’s “child molesters were rendered pathetic and innocuous” while “children were routinely rendered sexually flirtatious, precocious and even seductive.” Holding children as void of sexual agency and therefore innocent has created a need for the sexual scapegoat, that is the evil child molester hiding in the bushes. The implications of holding children up as totally incapable of seduction, erotic desire and sexual violence is damaging to children and adults. As Giroux outlined in his essay “Nymphet Fantasies,” the capitalist market is not above exploiting childhood innocence. Giroux argues that the child as a sexual void has lead to ““young girls being educated to function within…a limited sphere of cultural life,” and how “such a regressive education for young girls is more often the norm rather than the exception.” Such a site of mass cultural participation is subject to the manipulation of larger private interests.

Giving children this sort of innocence, and “protecting” them because of it, is also a really smug way of hiding the politicization of children’s media and culture. Giroux states “The people who ban Disney for pro-gay and lesbian labor practices have had little to say about the sexualization of young children in children’s beauty pageants, a social form as American as apple pie” Sexualization and infantilizing is a deployed strategy to politicize children. And they are, of course, the greatest demographic to use and exploit in political discourse because…they can’t vote.

Working towards a family mindset that keeps children out of psychical violence while still allowing them to explore their own burgeoning sexuality is a crucial step in destroying the stone cold gender binary existent in America.