“I WANT TO BE A SEX MANIAC!”
That’s the in your face title to chapter 7 of dear Frederic Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent. Here’s a juicy part from pages 174 and 175. Enjoy!
Pre-adolescence and adolescence are manifestly the most difficult period’s in children’s sexual development. This is so not only on acount of the maturing of the sexual instinct, as is commonly supposed, but also because of the awakening of soial feelings at that time. All human beings have to learn a rationale of controlling, disciplining, and, if you will, sublimating sexual impulses. Only a decent social orientation can lead to a decent sex life, for practically all psychlogical sex problems are ethical problems. In sexual education as in other education, one should also not forget that we are bringing children up not to e children, but to be adults.
Contrary to the opinion of unprogressive progressive educationalists, children like (italics in the orginal) to be guided. When we adults disappoint them by not giving any worthy models to follow, we theorize that children resent authority. They do not. Actually they have a natural need to be led and directed.
With the progress f scientific research, a road on which the names of Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, Freud, Stekel and Kinsey are signposts, we have learned more and more that sexual behavior varies widely and that many patterns which would used to be regarded as serious crimes, extremely immoral conduct or severe abnormalities do not deserve to be so seriously regarded. And yet education for a happy life must take into acount that sexual irregularities in one way or another may spell unhappiness and suffering. A liberal-minded attitude appropriate in dealing with fully grown adults is unfair when used as an excuse for not warding off harmful influences from children.
Comic books stimulate children sexually. That is an elementary fact of my research. In comic books over and over again, in pictures and text, and in the advertisements as well, attention is drawn to sexual characteristics and to sexual actions. As one group boy expressed it to me when I was discussing with a group what is good and bad in comics, “The sexism is bad but to tell you the truth, I like that most!” There are children – and very young ones, too, according to our researches – who get stirred up by this “sexism.” That is not the free development, that is a sexual arousal which amounts to seduction.