The Story of Childhood

by Libby Brooks

  It’s parents’ evening tonight, but Lauren isn’t nervous. ‘I’ve never had a bad parents’ evening. They always say good things about me.’

  Lauren’s mum returns with Ollie, but leaves him sleeping in the hall. Lauren says she got most of her ideas about sex from magazines and her mates. She’s always been able to talk to her mum, but for some things it’s a bit uncomfortable. She’s the magazine queen. She started off on Mizz when she was in Year 7, and then Bliss, Sugar, J17. She thinks they’re helpful. ‘I’d rather the information be there than not at all. It should be there because a lot of people don’t talk to their parents and feel more comfortable reading about stuff like that in magazines. I think they’re really good, them magazines. And it’s just one page [about sex] then the rest is different hairstyles and all them embarrassing stories.’

  Lauren didn’t get more than a biological cross-section during sex education at school. ‘Honestly, it was like the drawing – this is a woman, this a man – and we had about two lessons because they had to speed it on that quick. We had PSHE (personal, social and health education) in Year 7 and then they got rid of it in Year 8 because they didn’t have anyone to teach it.’

  ‘I just think that they should teach the facts, not “don’t do this, don’t do that”,’ she says, ‘and early enough, when you’re about eleven or twelve. You need a confident teacher, because if the teacher’s embarrassed then the kids are going to get embarrassed. And you should split up the boys and girls, so you feel more at ease.’

  Lauren’s experience of sex education is not unusual. In February 2005, a report by Ofsted found that provision of Sex and Relationships Education (SRE), a component of the non-statutory PSHE curriculum, was poor in many schools and non-existent in others. It particularly criticised the lack of trained staff, with classes seen as an add-on and directed by form teachers rather than specialists.

  Despite the widespread anxiety around children’s sexual activity, and the fact that most parents say they want more, not less, sex education, it is still not compulsory in our schools. All the curriculum requires is a basic biology lesson. Anything else is optional, and – oddly – decided by the school’s governors. Provision has certainly advanced since the moral fundamentalism of the Thatcher years, and policy has attempted to respond to young people’s well-documented requests for greater emphasis on feelings, relationships and values.

  But New Labour has been reticent in addressing the spectrum of sexual relations. Official guidance remains defensive, and based around a heterosexual and reproductive model – understandable given the right-wing media’s delight in exposing oral-sex lessons for ten-year-olds and the like. Although very few do, the fact that parents retain the right to withdraw their children from sex education is symbolic of the general view that young people are incapable of taking moral decisions themselves, and that the private sphere of the family remains the best place to receive sexual wisdom.

  While the average age for first intercourse in the UK is sixteen, significant numbers of younger teenagers are becoming sexually active. The Family Planning Association has called on the government to make teaching of PSHE a legal requirement from primary school onwards. But this will require a fundamental change in the way that we view young people’s sexual potential.

  Children have the capacity for arousal and orgasm from birth, but continue to be regarded as asexual until puberty. Adults are highly resistant to the fact of children’s burgeoning sexual knowledge, though the bulk of research shows that from an early age young people have an active curiosity and awareness about sex and sexuality. As the feminist sociologist Stevi Jackson argues, it is one of the first arenas in which children begin to question conventional definitions of right and wrong. But their capacity to manage this exploration is rarely acknowledged, and often stymied by adults’ own evasiveness and repression around sexual matters.

  In her book Childhood and Sexuality, Jackson suggests that there is such a thing as childhood sexuality, but that it exists independently of sexual knowledge. ‘If sexuality amounted to nothing more than a series of physical sensations and patterns of behaviour, an outpouring of sexual energies, then it would be possible to argue that children are sexual. If … it is something more than this … that must be understood in human and social terms, a sexually aware child can only be described as potentially sexual … It follows that there is no reason why children should not be sexual. Their sexuality lies not in a lack of capacity, but in a lack of opportunity; their inability to make sense of the world in sexual terms derives from ignorance.’

  Jackson concludes that it is sexual ignorance, not sexual knowledge, that is most damaging for the young. ‘In attempting to protect children from sex we expose them to danger; in trying to preserve their innocence we expose them to guilt. In keeping both sexes asexual, and then training them to become sexual in different ways, we perpetuate sexual inequality, exploitation and oppression.’

  Arguably, it is gender knowledge rather than sexual knowledge that is more damaging to children. Girls learn to embrace passivity and to view their sexuality as having a market value, both in private and public exchanges. They are taught a romantic story of their futures, of which sex forms one element, while boys learn that sex is a discrete act which underpins masculinity. As Laura and Ashley have described in their chapters, the double standard for sexual behaviour is thriving, and it will continue to do so as long as children are socialised in gender from birth, but expected to remain abstinent until the law tells them otherwise.

  Today’s young women are reputedly the most sexually confident, most sexually active generation ever, yet a third say that they have been coerced into sex and many more express regret at starting their sexual lives so early. Popular culture may offer superficially subversive notions of women as sexual aggressors, but for ordinary children this is far removed from having any practical working knowledge of their own bodies, or the confidence to protect them.

  If young women are indeed learning to value bravado over intimacy, and quantity over quality – while continuing to be punished, and to punish themselves, for displays of sexual agency – then feminism has failed to create an alternative to the macho prescription for sexual pleasure and relationships.

  The double standard exists not only between girls and boys, but also between adults and children. As professor of criminology Phil Scraton notes in an essay on regulating sexuality, ‘The denial of childhood sexuality is an essential component of the broader negation of children and young people as active citizens.’ He describes how children are expected to retain a sexual naivety and to be passive onlookers of a highly sexualised culture.

  Scraton critiques the biological essentialism that informs the delivery of sex education, which assumes that sexuality is linked to ‘natural’, developmental stages, and that feelings and knowledge develop similarly to this. ‘Sexuality permeates the school environment,’ he writes, ‘but the ideology of “childhood innocence” rejects schools as cultural sites where emergent sexual identities are formed, reproduced and lived. Also denied is the active engagement of children and young people in the formation of their sexual identities.’

  In 2003, the award-winning children’s author Melvin Burgess published Doing It, an explicit account of adolescent male sexuality. It was denounced by the children’s laureate Anne Fine as ‘vile, foul and deluded’ and was subjected to frenzied analysis. But when I read it, I found it an honest and deeply moral exposition of the charmlessness and vulnerability of teenage desire.

  The response was perverse: Burgess was slated for acknowledging that teenage boys can be pretty filthy in their relentless pursuit of a grope. But the same lads could read all about the latest celebrity sex scandal in Heat, or assess ‘real’ women’s assets in Nuts’ ‘Street Strip Challenge’.

  Most weeks, the newsagents’ shelves are heaving with breathless details of Abi Titmuss’s filthiest moments, and inventively angled photography revealing what may or may not be Jodie Marsh’
s labia majora. The acceptable subject areas are closely prescribed: virginity, loss and maintenance thereof; bisexuality (women’s); prowess and endurance (men’s). For the cohort of pretty girls done good, who rely upon their talent for exposure as much as their talent, such simulacra of sexual honesty become their currency.

  In her Guardian Weekend magazine investigation into lads’ mags like Zoo, Nuts and Loaded – which are snapped up by teenage boys – media commentator Janice Turner noted: ‘Once porn and real human sexuality were distinguishable … But as porn has seeped into mainstream culture, the line has blurred. To speak to men’s magazine editors, it is clear they believe that somehow in recent years, porn has become true. The sexually liberated modern woman turns out to resemble – what do you know! – the pneumatic, take-me-now-big-boy fuck-puppet of male fantasy after all.’

  But for all they are over-informed about how other people do it, this has not brought young men and women any closer to developing a common erotic language. There must be a way to diminish the junk succour of public sex while freeing private appetites. It is only by confronting the same-again sexism of our full-frontal society that we wrest back control of sex, its meaning and its language, from the mainstream pornographers.

  In a world where it often feels like every experience has been flayed of flavour through overexposure, sex is one of the few things that retains its tang. But until adults can address the double standard that surrounds young people’s experience of intimacy, this will remain a sexual revolution in waiting.

  Ollie still hasn’t stirred, but Lauren says he’s getting better at sitting up now. He’s making loads of noise, and he’s getting big. Her dad might take him to the pool because he’s a good swimmer, and he’s got a baby too. She points to one of the framed photographs on the shelves. ‘That’s my half-brother. He’s walking now. He’s gorgeous.’ There are photographs all over this house, studio poses as well as family snaps. At the top of the stairs there’s even a sepia-tinted shot of the three of them posing in Victorian costume, taken at Blackpool. They are stern-faced because the photographer told them not to smile.

  Lauren has another half-brother who’s in the army. He’s nearly twenty. Lee. He’s her dad’s son, but he lived with her and Dan since they were young, so she says he’s her brother. He comes home every other month. She misses him.

  Now she’s thinking about tea. ‘Are there any points in that ragu? It says “trace fat”.’

  ‘You still have to point it,’ warns her mum. She’s an expert at the Weightwatchers points system. She used to look like a man, says Danielle. Lauren is mock-horrified, but her mum agrees. ‘I did! I lost nearly four stone. I used to wear big checked shirts and everything. Then last January I just decided, and lost two stones in a month.’ Losing it was easy. Keeping it off’s the hard part.

  Now it’s February, and Danielle is bundled up in Lauren’s bed. She spewed up in her own room earlier and she hasn’t cleaned it up yet. They’re laughing about it.

  Lauren says her favourite thing in here is the mirror, ‘ ’cos I love looking at meself!’ She’s changed the room around recently, because she’s started to put Ollie in the cot at night.

  ‘Are you leaving the side down?’ asks her sister from under the duvet.

  ‘It’s easier,’ says Lauren efficiently. ‘I can just lean over.’

  Here’s a picture of her mum when she was fat, and here’s a picture of her and Danni at the old house when they were younger. And – ohh! – here’s this gorgeous boy from a boy band. Don’t you think he’s gorgeous? Danielle says she’s met him, and she didn’t think so.

  Lauren chose the decor because she loves pink. A set of star-shaped fairy lights loops around the window. On the corkboard by her bed there’s a ‘Best Friend’ poem and a ‘Special Friend’ award alongside photos of her pals. Beneath them there’s a hand-drawn heart that says ‘Lauren loves [Ollie’s father].’ She takes it down and folds it decisively in two. ‘I didn’t know that was there,’ she says. ‘It was under all that other stuff.’

  Downstairs again, her mum hands her Ollie, nappyless and shrieking. Parents’ evening was good, but there’s not much else going on. She’s concentrating on school really. She’s feeling stressed about work. That’s why she stayed behind an extra hour today, to get some done. She gets all this work and she thinks, ‘When am I going to have time to do it?’

  The first week at Weightwatchers she lost two pounds, then the next week she put a pound and a half back on. She laughs. ‘I had McDonald’s on Saturday, so it’s my own fault.’ She needs to get Ollie dressed now because she’s going out at six. She’s been trying on an old jacket to see if it fits. She’s going to Asda with her Weightwatchers friend, who wants to buy a fitness DVD. She’s not getting anything herself. She’s got about six pounds to her name. It’s just to get out the house.

  Before she had Ollie, she never had money either. ‘My mum doesn’t just hand it out. The money I get for Ollie I spend on him, and if there’s any left I save it, or I might take a tenner. I’m not really bothered through the week, as long as I have money on a Friday night, because that’s my night off.’

  Lauren would like to have a bit more money – who wouldn’t? But the gap between rich and poor is massive. ‘You’ve got homeless people who don’t have 20p. And then you’ve got all the rich people with their homes in Cornwall. And it’s not just a gap of money is it? It’s a gap of understanding. If a really rich person walked past a person begging he wouldn’t even look at them, he wouldn’t acknowledge them.’

  Ollie is squalling as she pulls on his trousers. She tells him he’s a Naughty Boy. He bubbles his spit, and a string of it attaches to one of the rips in her jeans. Lauren lost her virginity to Ollie’s father when they’d been seeing each other for about three months. ‘Most of my friends think it’s whenever you want. As long as you’re not with a different boy all the time, then they’d be worried.’

  Ollie’s fully dressed now, and Lauren talks into his cheek. Virginity makes her snort. ‘I don’t know anyone who is! Because everything’s about sex, innit? Like music videos, it’s advertised all over the place, Page Three women. Staying a virgin is a bit old-fashioned. I think it’s only the religious people who do that.’

  Most girls nowadays think it’s all right to have sex when you’ve been with someone for a couple of months. But sex is different at different times. ‘If you’ve got a boyfriend then it’s for closeness and all that, but if it’s just a one-night thing it’s fun, and it doesn’t mean anything. I think if it’s with your boyfriend it’s making love; if it’s a one-night thing then it’s just sex.’ She thinks boys feel the same, but they’re not as open about it. Ollie is manoeuvring a plastic model into his mouth. ‘What are you doing, you? You’re going to choke.’

  Lauren doesn’t want to get married. ‘Especially nowadays, it’s not as committed as it used to be. People have three or four marriages. At the end of the day it’s only a piece of paper. And if you love someone and you’ve been with them for years then what’s a piece of paper going to add to it? I’d rather just be loving with someone.’

  She calls to her mum: ‘Do you think I should get married?’ Her mum puts her head round the kitchen door, and pulls a face. ‘I bet I get that off you,’ Lauren tells her. ‘I’ve never been one to fantasise about weddings and dresses, have I?’ Her own parents weren’t married. No, her mum confirms. She was with him for years and she never wanted to.

  It’s later in February now, and the afternoon light is lasting longer. There’s a non-commital drizzle. Lauren’s lost six and a half pounds. It was half-term last week, and she got loads of work done. She’s got two five-hour exams for textiles coming up, and four weeks to get her final piece ready. When she got back to school she thought everyone else would have done loads more than her, but they hadn’t.

  Her sister is sitting in an armchair, writing birthdays on to the kitchen calendar. Her mum has just come back with Ollie, and now he’s wriggling under the
coffee-table, frantically trying to push himself up with his arms.

  ‘He’s dead frustrated!’ she laughs. ‘He’s been trying to crawl but not quite mastering it. He’s not learnt to coordinate his arms and legs yet.’ He had a bit of diarrhoea last week and they had to starve him for twenty-four hours and give him Dioralyte powder in water. But since then he’s been really good. He’s falling asleep on his own now. If he does wake up it’s just for reassurance and if you stroke him he goes straight back to sleep.

  Lauren itches her eye. Danielle put Nutella on her face this morning and it’s all dried up on her eyelashes. She’s never been interested in politics, she says. She’s interested in what goes on but she’s never watched all the debating. She doesn’t like Tony Blair because he wanted to send her brother to Iraq. She pauses. ‘I’ve always wondered that, how do you get to be a politician? Is it people that know the Queen? Or people that own businesses?’ Danielle says you have to get in the party really low down and then work your way up. ‘Oooh, go Danielle!’ teases Lauren.

  If she was in charge, she’d have more textbooks in schools, and better sex education. She thinks there should be more support for teenage mothers. ‘I was reading a magazine yesterday about two sisters who had two little boys and they were only fifteen and seventeen and one got expelled from school because the teacher said she was a bad influence on the other girls. Ohhhh!’ she exhales outrage. ‘I was gob-smacked!’

  There should be more support, not just money-wise but also day centres where you can go, or groups where you can meet other people your age who have kids. ‘’Cos my friends, they understand everything about me apart from when I talk about him. And people always talk about it like it’s bad. I don’t mean, “Oh just get pregnant and we don’t care,” but things happen and there should be people to help.’

  In 1914, the popular child care expert Ellen Key suggested that all girls around Lauren’s age should undergo a year’s ‘social service’ – to coincide with young men’s military service – in order to prepare them for the challenges of motherhood. This is not so different from the parenting education in schools that has been mooted as an effective way of maintaining children’s mental well-being. But for now, parenting skills have become increasingly professionalised.