A confusing sensuality: how intimate in the relationship with your own child?

You could say that I was pretty much on track by now. In a short time I received a relatively large number of assignments to write (fictional) sex stories. When I got around to writing the last one, after funerals, friendships, threesomes, lecture halls, cars, the Black Forest and old, young, thin and fat bodies, I decided to introduce a mother and daughter. Like I said, I was on a roll.

The plot was simple: a woman (28), who has also been a single mother for one year, goes away for a long weekend with her child to a colleague’s beach house, she seems happy, she doubts whether she has fallen in love with a good friend of hers. should embrace her, but she is completely content now, alone with her child, during the day they enjoy the nice weather, when her child goes to bed that first evening she pleasures herself, outside on the cooled grass, with a rattle from her child. The next hot summer day she masturbates again, this time in the dunes, on their way to the beach, only now her child is sleeping next to her. The story ends with those two bodies in the undulating sea: the small clinging tightly to the large.

The fact that I lay awake at night a few times in the months leading up to publication was partly due to the story itself – could these sexual acts even be near a child? – but mainly because the story in a sex bundle, Fucking Horny, would appear. In that context, it might appear that the small child is the source of her sexual arousal.

Of course, I knew about my character that this was not the case, she is just horny as most people are horny from time to time, only she is also a mother in addition to being a human being, but that fictional story made me wonder several things urgently to ask. How sexual is the relationship with your small child, and how sexual should it be?

Skin contact

Life with small children is, in my experience, very intimate. Intimacy does not necessarily have to be physical, says Professor of Clinical Psychology Paul Verhaeghe Intimacy, it is rather about really seeing the other and being really seen yourself, but in this context I mean intimately physical, as in sensual; small children make it easy to enjoy physicality. Those little shrimp fingers that fiddle with your cheeks, mouth, ears, belly, breasts all day long; that little body you carry around for hours, the time that goes into making sure it doesn’t get hurt, taking care of it, caressing it. I have never had as much skin contact as during this period as a young parent. But of course this does not mean that the relationship is sexual. That the relationship produces sexual arousal.

That’s what young parenthood teaches me about sexuality: so much of it is sensuality; enjoy your own or another body. Or maybe I should say: sensuality is such a big part of sexuality, but it isn’t. Touching each other’s bodies doesn’t mean you’re going to have sex. Or if it has anything to do with it. Of course, logically, you would think, do you have to have a child to learn that? On the other hand, how often do people feel obligated or responsible for sexual acts after intimate physical contact? How often do we associate (bare) bodies with sex?

That even happens with children’s bodies. For example, I recently heard a story about a father (my generation) who does not want to change his child. Because it’s a girl. This line of thought therefore assumes that a vulva is something sexual anyway.

I can laugh and be indignant about that, but that first year I often doubted what the world should see of the physical intimacy between my daughter and me. When she was a few months old, she ‘looked’ with her mouth; everything she put in; my nose, ears, cheeks, fingers. Then there was a phase where sometimes she put her mouth against mine, her tongue sticking out. Did I allow that in a restaurant? No. People would still think that.

What makes it so confusing: The physical, intimate life with a child can make you physically “turned on,” just as a crush or lovemaking can do. It produces the same pleasant physical sensations. For example, breastfeeding gave me an exciting feeling in my gut, confusing yes, but that does not make the relationship with my child sexual: I do not pursue sexual acts with her because I had those physical feelings.

Laugh very hard

In 1978, activist and feminist Audre Lorde wrote the essay Uses of the erotic: the erotic as power. In it, Lorde argued that the erotic is a creative, transformative force that humans (particularly women) have been taught to repress, but which provides tremendous pleasure and satisfaction; the erotic, according to Lorde, went much further than the sexual and had nothing to do with pornography. Eroticism is about feeling, in specifically feeling what feels good, and in traditional porn (from 1978) women don’t feel anything. There is sex that is not erotic; eroticism can also have nothing to do with sex.

Lorde shows how broad the concept of eroticism is, dancing with others can also be erotic, or laughing very hard: I think it’s basically about being physically on, about feeling a zest for life, sometimes it manifests itself in sex yes, but eroticism is mainly a cocktail of sensuality, love, attention, care. It’s quite a vague concept the way Lorde defines it, and maybe that’s why we barely know her meaning of the word. Nowadays, when we think of eroticism, we mainly think of the flat meaning of the word: of sex films or romantic books in which it is only about the tension or whether the woman is eventually penetrated by the man. With eroticism I would not necessarily think of the relationship with your child. And yet I might call it that. Isn’t the relationship with your child mainly erotic, in Lorde’s sense?

An episode of Where should we start, a podcast by psychotherapist Esther Perel in which you listen to someone else’s relationship therapy. In this particular episode we listen to a couple, two women, who have two young children together; one partner (who works full-time) feels rejected because the other partner (who is a stay-at-home mom) never wants to have sex with her again, or at least want to do something romantic with the two of them. Her explanation is that her skin hunger, her need for intimacy, is already completely satisfied in the (physical) contact with her children. That makes sense: love, attention, intimacy, sexuality; doesn’t it all come from the same jar? A jar that is filled (or used up) enough at a certain moment. When viewed this way, the relationship between you and your child may seem sexual; the physical contact gives self-confidence and security, just like with a (sexual) partner.

But they are two different things: there is a clear difference between sensuality (with a child, for example) and sexuality, says Perel. According to her, parenthood does not generate sexual desire – parenthood is synonymous with giving; care for others. Only when you have time and space for yourself, says Perel, can you discover and feel your own sexual desires.

Of course, we don’t know if the “housemother” from the episode (whose own mother, we hear, had also only learned to take care of her children instead of herself) didn’t know the difference before the arrival of her children. between sensuality (or eroticism) and sexuality. In any case, the arrival of her two children has not clarified this. Those who have never learned to make room for their own sexual feelings will not easily learn this with small children, simply because of the lack of space for yourself.

Pillow

From the book 100 answers in sex education (2022) by Belle Barbé also shows that many parents find it confusing which actions we do and do not consider sexual. For question eight ‘How do I deal with touching my child’s genitals’, Barbé asks a parent who, as a small baby, always gave her daughter kisses all over her body after a bath, ‘I skipped her genitals because I thought it strange to kiss it. At the same time, I also thought it was crazy not to do it’. The parent (by the way, it is not explicitly stated anywhere that it is a mother, strangely enough I immediately assume that, as if that is a safer and more obvious option) concludes that he was mainly concerned with what others would think.

In her book, Barbé encourages parents of young children to normalize sexuality as a whole, from birth (take the diaper off more often, name genitals as such, and not with ‘flute’ or ‘plum’ – that only wakes you up later confusion: ‘Peter, would you like to play a piece on your flute for us?’), and she also advocates a much more conscious sexual education, but however erotic the relationship between parent and child may be, she leaves it up to the parent. If you yourself feel that something is not possible (anymore), then don’t do it (anymore), she writes.

So how do you know if your relationship with your child is only erotic, not sexual? How do you find those boundaries for yourself and your child?

In an online sex education lecture from Valley Orgasm – a company that sells (online) Taoist courses in self-love – I find some sort of answer. They tell how sexuality always plays an important role between you and your child, because as a parent you simply live sexuality. Children take over your experience of sexuality. If you want your child to become a sexually safe person, you have to be that as a parent. According to them, a sexually safe person is a person who does not suppress his/her/their sexuality, but whose sexuality is not boundless either. If you yourself are sexually safe, I conclude from this, the relationship with your child will not be sexual (unsafe), but erotic.

Was my character ‘wrong’ or not? Could what she did? As a creator, I would describe her as a sexually safe person. Therefore, what she did did not make the relationship with her child sexual. But exactly the same situation, exactly the same actions, could make another person’s relationship with his child sexual.

When I told a friend about the question of this essay, she eagerly sat up in her chair, leaned over the café table and began to whisper a list of Dutch celebrities whose relationships with their adolescent children she thought were very sexual. looked. I thought she was joking. At home I looked up the relevant names anyway, and damn, she was right: how mother and son looked at each other, how father and daughter took a selfie together; they might as well have been romantic, sexual partners.

We live in a special time when it comes to sexuality: #MeToo has created space in society for (possible) major sexual change. For women first, but actually for every gender. Experience shows that the liberation of sexuality can also lead to boundlessness, instead of security, as happened, for example, during the sexual revolution of the 1960s. This is why this time calls for an intensification of the debate: if women, if people, are allowed to are in their own way, what does this mean, for example, for the care they provide? How do we create safe situations instead of boundless ones?

I wrote a story in which I wanted to eroticize parenthood, but I used (mostly) sex to do so. Because the difference was apparently not clear enough for me either. If people are given more space to experience sensuality, eroticism and sexuality in the future, it is important that we openly discuss the differences between these terms.