Mascot history, masked in mystery

What a load of old cock from Rubber Knob, a troll who shafted gorgeous 13-year-old Romeo Beckham recently for the crime of being a mascot at a soccer international. Too privileged, he said. The gig should have gone to a “poor little lad with leukaemia” instead of a son of the game’s superstar elder statesman David.
A bunch of like-minded knockers quickly joined this Knob. Piling into a gang-bang, they claimed Romeo was “too old” to be a mascot and “didn’t deserve” the role; he had only been allowed to step out onto the hallowed Wembley Stadium turf with England captain Wayne Rooney because his dad had pulled strings. Why couldn’t it have been a ragged street urchin instead, or an orphaned maiden, plucked from plying her humble trade as an under-age sex slave?
I exaggerate slightly, but that was the tone, with the implication that the point of having mascots is to give the lowly and the unfortunate a brief respite from their unfêted fate, letting them bask in the limelight for once. As such, this would in itself be a decent gesture; I don’t knock the sentiment.
But it is not what mascots have traditionally been about. The knockers’ revisionist ideas are a revealing sign of the times, as I will aim to show.
Taking tradition first, the word mascot itself goes back a long way. From the French word “mascotte”, it means a talisman, or charm, and is derived from the word “masco”, a sorceress, and “mascoto”, a “spell”. It was used to describe anything that brought luck to a household. The word was first popularized in 1880, when French composer Edmond Audran wrote a comic operetta titled La Mascotte. Since then, mascots have come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, but the tendency seems to have been away from the portable amulets and talismans that have been carried and worn for luck and protection since ancient times, towards more animated and larger forms.
A famous one is the regimental goat. We are told the tradition of goats in the military originated in 1775, when a wild goat walked onto the battlefield in Boston during the American Revolutionary War and led the Welsh regimental colours at the end of the Battle of Bunker Hill.
Sports clubs also started to use animals as mascots – real, live, ones were brought along to the games. Most of them were predators, expected to roar and strike fear into the hearts of their opponents. These days it tends to be a human dressed up as an inspirationally fierce animal, such as a wolf or a tiger. There is also a whole menagerie of less threatening, family-friendly, creatures, such chickens or badgers, or more or less any Disneyfied animal.
There is even an inflatable boy, but don’t get too excited. He is not quite what you may be thinking: we are still in “family-friendly” territory here!
What many of these weird and wonderful critters have in common, from goat to boy, is an element of humour. The regimental goat tends to be given an official rank and decorated with campaign medals, none of which can be taken seriously. The boy is enormous, bigger than any adult, which is a comical travesty.
Why then, did real children – initially just boys – become mascots? They may often make us laugh, but there is nothing intrinsically funny about their appearance. Their behaviour may be on the wild side, but no way is a little kid symbolically fearsome, like a lion or a bear.
My guess, and at present I see no evidence that could take me beyond speculation, is that a boy was seen as emblematic: he was a visible embodiment of the future of the sport, and of the club whose colours he wore. Yes, like any mascot he was there to bring good luck. But his power to do so sprang from the joy and optimism generated simply by his appealing presence. It is a magical sort of power, to be sure; but, unlike earlier tokens of luck and protection, it needs no magician or sorceress to cast spells and invest the mascot with the necessary magic. It is just there.
Now, if I am right about the child mascot’s original role, the one crucial requirement of any particular boy mascot is that he should be plausibly emblematic. He must look the part. It must seem as though, one day, he could well be playing for the team, leading it to victory. So he must be lean, well-proportioned, athletic and good-looking, with every suggestion he has been favoured by the gods. He would do well, for instance, to look like Romeo Beckham! Or perhaps a younger boy quite like him – his 10-year-old brother Cruz, perhaps!
But not his little sister, four-year-old Harper. Nothing wrong with her appearance, but on the reasoning just outlined she would only make a good mascot for a women’s team. And as for older brother Brooklyn, 16, he is way too old: if he is going to make his mark on the football field, he will need to be a player, not a mascot. Maybe he will.
The same iron logic means no children dying of leukaemia as mascots; none in wheelchairs either, and definitely no plague victim, by which I mean the grotesque plague of corpulence that threatens to crush the planet to the size of a football under the weight of its fat kids – its ugly fat kids, I should add. They are not a pretty sight.
No, the mascot should be a perfect specimen of the master race. Oops! Sorry, getting a bit carried away here with a perhaps suspiciously Nazi-sounding philosophy of perfection. The idea of fiercely competitive, all-conquering youth leading the way to a glorious future does rather invoke the world of Tomorrow belongs to me! and a policy of exterminating burdensome weaklings – the physically and mentally handicapped, the “degenerate” sexual minorities – along with “inferior” races.
While that extreme is devoutly to be shunned, I do find myself wondering whether we might now be drifting towards an unsustainable opposite extreme, in which the laudable goal of social inclusion (a kind philosophy, to all except kind people like us, of course) is becoming too indulgent and unselfcritical. The now very common inclusion of often seriously overweight kids as mascots is a good example. The social inclusion theme was a marvellous feature of the hugely successful 2012 London Olympics, which showed that caring about all sorts of minorities, including the “differently abled” paralympians, need not be at odds with an environment fundamentally grounded in competition and achievement. The idea is good. But it does have limits. Fats kids do not get to be footballers – and the market for sumo wrestlers is somewhat limited.
Not that mascot culture is being driven entirely by a thought-through vision of social inclusion. Professional sport is a commercial concern. In recent times, especially, although perhaps longer in the U.S. than in most places, clubs have been focusing with fiendish cunning on how to extract every last dollar and dime from the fans. Stadium ticket prices have rocketed along with TV-generated interest and greater discretionary spending power for the well-to-do: going to a soccer match, traditionally a pastime for working class men of often very modest earnings, is now increasingly just for affluent families who can afford kits for the kids in the club’s colours at outrageous prices – colours and designs, furthermore, that are frequently changed, necessitating further purchases.
Nor has the mascot escaped this monetary molestation. Whereas in the old days there was just one mascot for each game, there are now up to 22, each assigned to one of the players on either side. Any here’s the really clever bit: the clubs have done their marketing so brilliantly that parents will now pay, often handsomely (up to £600 at some Premierships clubs), for the privilege of having their kid groomed by a complete stranger! How can it fail to be a grooming opportunity, at least, when the player is actually required to hold the hand of a hero-worshipping child, and the couple have nothing whatever to do except exchange sweet nothings with each other while waiting in the tunnel – the Tunnel of Love, as it were!
Not that you would guess it from seeing the players when the TV cameras are on them. Embarrassment is all but universal. The guys tend to look anywhere but at the mascots, either the one assigned to them of anyone else’s: a scuff mark on the tunnel wall suddenly becomes engrossing. An uneasy silence reigns. The last thing they want is to look like someone who would enjoy being with children. Hell no: a respectable man hates kids!
I said above that I could only speculate on the original reason for children being introduced as mascots. This is because, unlike almost any other aspect of sports culture imaginable, there is a dearth of online information. There must be a zillion websites going into arcane detail about club colours, badges and other such paraphernalia; there is even an American Mascot Hall of Fame, but it is devoted to comical cartoon-type mascots, not child ones. As with the players in the tunnel looking away, I suspect the subject is just too embarrassing for anyone to research. The clubs themselves give marketing information about their mascot packages: the price, what is included the deal, such as a tour of the stadium and so forth. But the ones I have seen pay no attention whatever to the rationale for child mascots and the history of the idea. If anyone knows of a club site that does this, do tell.
One might have supposed there would be some academic research out there somewhere. The child mascot is beyond question of sociological interest. But even Google is stumped on this one. All I could turn up was a mascot function for children in dysfunctional families. The search button at the Museum of Childhood in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum also draws a blank: page after page shows colourful illustrations of cuddly toy mascots for children, but nothing on children as mascots, a tradition that appears to have emerged at some point in the late 19th or early 20th century burgeoning of organised sport, with its well established clubs and substantial fan base.
But the first child mascot may have been long before. The ideal of beautifully perfect, perfectly beautiful, athletic youth was inspirational in Ancient Greece around two and a half thousand years ago, and perhaps a fair bit longer, going back to before the first Olympic Games in 776 BC.
It depends what you a call a “child” though. At 13, is young Romeo Beckham a child or a youth? The Greeks – and indeed the Nazis, who were consciously inspired by them – fetishised youth rather than childhood. And, unless we count the mischievous god Eros as a sort of mascot (stretching it a bit, I think), the first true child mascot I can think of was Roman, not Greek.
He was a little boy, barely more than a toddler when he became a much loved mascot. Like Romeo Beckham, he was the son of a superstar. This was Germanicus, a general, lauded in his day as the greatest military leader since Alexander. Brought up among his father’s troops, the lad wore a tiny uniform just like the ordinary soldiers – and they adored the kid! They even gave him a nickname that stuck longer than anyone would have imagined, a name based on a particular item of his “replica team kit”: his boots. They called him Little Boots. Or, as they said in their Latin, Caligula!
Caligula went on, of course, to become somewhat less popular as an emperor. One can only hope that young Romeo finds a better way of being a retired mascot. Fortunately, unlike child film stars, ex-mascots do not appear to go spectacularly wrong very often!

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Cyril

sexual scandals in the cheerleading industry:

I don’t know whether you need it

mr pedo-man

I must add..Did you see the final of the Rugby world cup, Where the NZ captain embraced a boy who ran onto the pitch, He put his arm around him and gave him his medal – Though to be honest, I felt kinda jealous, In the past he would be a rival to the affections of youth: If you’ve not seen, check it out, He at least seemed to have no fear of being seen to friendly to the boy.

leonard sisyphus mann

In my meanderings through the seedier back-alleys of Youtube I came across this video, and thought of this issue of mascots.
It consists of a series of visuals showing how Society (apparently) sexualises children – with quotations from someone called Alan Watts (who according to Rationalwiki is “a Scottish-Canadian conspiracy theorist, who runs the online conspiratorial ministry, Cutting Through The Matrix, where he preaches New World Order conspiracy theories while trying to make a few bucks selling books and DVDs.”) – all with a heavy dose of loud music which makes it hard to make out what this Alan Watt is actually saying.
Well, from what I can tell it’s all a bit loopy. And the loopiness comes to a kind of climax towards the end of this video when, after the words ‘PREPARING YOU USING PLAYER ESCORTS’ have flashed up on the screen, we see a series clips and photos of footballers with their mascots.
The youtube description for the video reads:
“Dance tune featuring the vocals of Alan Watt.
Elite’s plan for a future world full of paedophilia for their own twisted pleasure.
If you think ‘Player Escorts’ are just to give kids a dream day out – think again.
That is another ploy to soften the people’s minds to seeing (their) kids in the company of other adults.”
YouTube: Future World Of Paedophilia Remix
Well, there’s your explanation for mascots Tom – and apparently there’s a new evil abroad in society: ‘seeing kids in the company of other adults’.
Dear me, pass me the smelling salts!

“Dance tune featuring the vocals of Alan Watt.
Elite’s plan for a future world full of paedophilia for their own twisted pleasure.
If you think ‘Player Escorts’ are just to give kids a dream day out – think again.
That is another ploy to soften the people’s minds to seeing (their) kids in the company of other adults.”
There is something very beautiful in anti-pedophilia, but I dread to think that none of you will understand never. (because here you are all pedophiles, it is understood, obvious).
It is curious, if I said what I think of pedophiles, would be expelled for life from here, but at the same time I want to be like all of you, for to see something sexual in a 4 year old girl… or youre a genius or a madman… but it is better for humanity not to know certain things.
I was born with the curse of not being a pedophile, I envy Tom and Lensman… finally, I’ll have to go to BC and GC and fantasizing about being one, I hope there will not expel me from there just for being a hebephile and a religious nut… in BC and GC are just nice people. 🙂

thenewsexualorder

That’s the problem, Tom, kind people are not only kind people who only want to be playing with children – that literally would be a “pedophile”. Now is pederasty, do not want only that “play” with them, pedophiles want a sexual identity, and to do things with kids who could do with adults, I do not say it’s wrong, but is like with homosexuality… for heteros, without implied homosexuality the ancient Greeks were seen as manly virile men who had a genuine masculine union, but with implied homosexuality as seen main as perverted and sick, for adultophiles, love and care of children without implied pedophilia, is a form of parental love, but with implied pedophilia is a illness and a potential molestation.
But that’s not the worst, all of you are pedophiles, and they [the non-pedos] call you “pedophiles” indeed – maybe the word “pedophile” is a type of “downside”, however. But I no, if I had a hypothetical relationship with a girl of 11 years would also be a “pedophile” no one will care that is hebephilia, I never have my identity of being a hebephile (nor understand the difference between prepuber and puber), I it would always be something I’m not, that makes me sad…
Or for you, Tom, the hebephilia is a form of pedophilia anyway? if I am hebephile, it would also be a pedophile?

thenewsexualorder

Thanks, Tom, you’ve completely cleared me this issue, as it shows that you are a good writer!
And it’s true that they are overlapping circles, I feel attracted me to girls aged 9 or 10 years too, so it would be a pedohebephile, and in my research almost all MAPs are attracted to 4-12, that also would come into the hebephile range, so you’re right.
And I would like to defend myself of that accusation, because there really has not been an attempt to save my own skin, but really I feel attracted only to the older girls and it makes me than I not feel part of the rest of pedophiles, so I been just searching for my identity but as I am pedohebephile I have no choice but to be with my nonces … I say my favorite “kinds” hehehe
What I would like to know, why this “gentleman” named Blanchard used a word like “hebephilia” as a mental illness, I mean, hebephilia looks like a positive term, sounds good, and is named after a Greek goddess …
Who would use that word so wonderful to define an “aberration”? best would be to use a word that sounds devious as “pedophile” (at least I think so, please no offense), not a word with the name of a goddess…

A.

Sometimes people with surprisingly elderly AOAs will come to stand under the MAP umbrella. Wilson and Cox wondered why the guy who said 16-year-old girls were his sexual ideal had joined PIE. Two GirlChatters not very long ago said their AOAs were 14-50 and 15-30 respectively. No reasonable person would claim those AOAs are anything but bog-standard typical. But maybe the guys were unhappy living in a jurisdiction where the age of consent is 18, or just wanted to celebrate the beauty of teenage girls with people they knew would understand. Or maybe they had been made to feel guilty and ‘paedophilic’ about extremely normal attractions. Then there were two guys who (I think I’m remembering this right) lived in a jurisdiction where the age of consent is 14 and who listed their AOAs as 14-18 and 16-20 respectively. They weren’t going to have any legal problems — well, perhaps over porn, actually. But the older someone like that gets, the more his relationships will be seen as ‘creepy’ and unacceptable, and while he may not be the marrying kind, or may fall for a 17-year-old who’s already ready for commitment and live happily ever after with her, he may find that he’s wanting to settle down while his love interests are wanting to play the field. So…honorary MAPs, perhaps?

A.

I suspect a lot of people are paedohebephiles (I am!). I have a document with a long list of the AOAs given by CLs in various corners of the Internet, such as this one, psychforums etc. The five AOAs most commonly listed by GLs in my sample, if such it can be called, are 4-11, 6-12, 8-14, 9-14, 11-15. The five most commonly listed by BLs are 6-16, 7-12, 8-13, 8-14, 11-14. For what it’s worth.
I saw a report a while ago on a US study which found that BLs tended on average to be most attracted to boys 10-13 and GLs to girls 8-10. That fits with my observations. But now I can’t find the wretched thing! Anyone seen it?

A.

I think though that that’s partly an artefact of hebephiles being less likely to associate with CL organisations and web fora. They’re probably too busy having sex with 15-year-olds in any of the many jurisdictions where this is legal! And I have several times seen a rather sad situation in which a guy wanders into GirlChat or wherever, says, for instance, “I like girls 13-16! Anybody else?” and there’s silence because it’s a bit of a paedophiles’ club, and he doesn’t come back.
One thing I have definitely noticed is that there are a lot more GL than BL nepiophiles. And funnily enough you can even sometimes see this tendency in bisexual CLs. There are plenty saying e.g. “I like boys and girls 6-14” but there are also plenty saying e.g. “I like boys 8-14 and girls 3-8.”

mr pedo-man

I remember watching the tennis back in 2010 i think…And David Beckham was observing the match with one of his sons; The kid looked around 11 – 12ish…I remember feeling very jealous of Mr Beckham, because of the way he showed such affection to the kid — A bit like in your book Tom, When you mention the time MJ displayed his young friend on his knee: I almost turned over, Despite being an avid fan of tennis.

A.

Some of that about in tennis too: as you’re probably aware, in middle age ‘Big Bill’ Tilden got into trouble for sex with two boys aged fourteen and sixteen (separate encounters, not both at once!). According to Wikipedia, years later the second boy, now of course an adult, “filed a lawsuit claiming he had suffered severe mental, physical, and emotional damage from the encounter”. Rather like what happens today, then…

Sylvie

Nicely informative blog, Tom – light-hearted in tone and everything. It has failed to have me fall for the boy-mascot, but I am certainly fascinated by the regimental goat decorated with campaign medals!

thenewsexualorder

In fact, as hebephile I think the Greeks were totally right in that matter, a pubescent boy is not child but a youth, the classification of pubertal boys and girls as “children” was one of the greatest crimes in modern society, denying the inalienable right to be considered “young teenagers” instead of children by their biological and intellectual capacity, ie their ability to reproduce and develop their secondary attributes (a beautiful 14 year old mother … yay!), if you see the statues of the goddess Hebe will see a young woman full of life and sexuality, not a lifeless doll as society treats young people, I think apart from saying around here “children are sexual” we should say “pubescent boys and girls are not children, are adolescents” to be fair.
With that I don’t mean to have a taste for prepubertal children is bad, no, I sometimes I like prepuberal girls too! but there is a big – very big- difference between a child and a teenager, and that’s what society does not accept, like as does not accept children’s sexuality or MAPs.
By the way, I like to know that Tom knows about Roman emperors, because that the boylovers and girlovers are a bit like them, hated and despised but with a power that is not for everyone – and that power is pedophilia and hebephilia.

Christian

In all preindustrial societies adolescence did not exist. You were considered as an adult with full responsibilities and privileges at an age between 13 and 15. And there was no “adolescence crisis”, it is an artificial consequence of the infantilization of teenagers.
The study by Berns GS, Moore S, Capra CM, “Adolescent Engagement in Dangerous Behaviors Is Associated with Increased White Matter Maturity of Frontal Cortex” in PLoS ONE 4(8): e6773 (2009), doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0006773, shows that for the age range 14-18, some “risky behaviours” are positively correlated with myelinization of the prefrontal cortex, in other words, maturity. The paper is available here:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0006773
See also reports of it in popular science journals:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-08/eu-sri082509.php
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090825203341.htm
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=risk-taking-teens-mature-brains
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=are-teens-who-behave-reck
Thus 14 seems a “magical age”, the other being 10 according to Gilbert Herdt and Martha McClintock. So I would say that around age 10 you change from “child” to “youth” and around age 14 or 15 you become a “young adult”.

Edmund

What do you mean by “full citizen”? To continue your list of the growing rights of the ageing Roman, he could not be elected quaestor until he was 30, aedile until 36, praetor until 39 or consul until 42 and “senator” derives from senex, an old man. A strong belief in the family as a unit needing a head with authority and a belief that power should be restricted to those who might have acquired wisdom with age have, with some good reasons, been features of many societies besides Rome. I don’t think we should confuse them with the infantilisation of adolescents, which, as Christian has said, is a unique feature of industrialised societies, which I say are thus uniquely perverse and conducive to adolescent misery.
Edmund, author of Alexander’s Choice, http://www.amazon.com/Alexanders-Choice/dp/1481222112

Edmund

I feel sure you are right on both points. While I am struggling to think of a Roman family debilitated by the senility of its pater familias, and I wonder (but do not know) whether the patres familias who reached 80 then did not tend to be the sort of old men who were strongest in mind as well as body, it must sometimes have happened as you describe.
As for admitting “the frequent headstrongness and folly of youth” and allowing a boy to go with prostitutes, “but not to spend too much money on them”, I can only say that that makes admirable sense to me, and I suspect most adolescent boys would find themselves more easily in harmony with such values than with the entirely prohibitive 21st-century ones. It seems to me incredibly naive to make 18 the be all and end all, disallowing the 17-year-old all possibility of experimenting and learning from his mistakes, while empowering the 18-year-old to ruin his family and his country. In my view, not much progress (except in “technology”) has been made in two millenia!

A.

“…admitted the frequent headstrongness and folly of youth” puts me in mind of Shakespeare: “I would there were no age between sixteen and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting…” When that was written, ten-year-olds were being sent out into the world as apprentices. But clearly there was some recognition of what we would now call adolescence. Speaking of which, the apprenticeship system often meant that an apprentice was bound to and provided for by his, or sometimes her, master, or sometimes mistress, well into what we would even now consider young adulthood. Given the low average life expectancy, many people must have spent most of their lives in this condition and only a small fraction of their lives fully independent.
PS Chuckled at “tomorrow belongs to me”.

A.

It does, yes. Though in the middle-class US ‘the college experience’ is huge (let’s sell dorm-room furniture and make lots of money!) and it normally ends at twenty-two. Could there possibly be some analogy with an apprenticeship, if, as was quite common, the apprentice signed on at fifteen for a seven-year term, and if (s)he was lucky enough to live in a kind household and do congenial work? If memory serves there were laws passed here and there by people sick of apprentices going out and getting drunk and making noise and indulging in petty vandalism, rather like many of today’s undergraduates! Then, with regard to the “getting wenches with child” bit, it seems that in those days quite a few people didn’t become fertile till sixteen or even later.

A.

Didn’t know that. It’d make sense, though, as girls are typically not that fertile for at least the first year following menarche, and even after that there is a greater risk of something going wrong in childbirth, as the pelvis doesn’t reach its maximum size until about 18 on average.

A.

As you’re probably aware, some countries still have ages of candidacy that quite closely mirror the Roman ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_candidacy .

Christian

According to my Latin dictionary (and something similar in a French book on the history of adolescence), in Latin the word “adulescens” means a young person between the ages of 15 and 35.
But other examples: the Jewish Bar Mitzvah (at 13 for boys, 12 and a half for girls) was formerly a rite of passage into adulthood; still today the Na/Mosuo (a Chinese matrilinear ethny where marriage does not exist) grant adult status at 13, at that age you can speak and vote in a family council, but such young adults are still under the authority of elders for important things such as working and school.
I grant that after 10 and 14, there is a third “magical age” around 25-30, where maturity of the prefrontal cortex is reached (for making important decisions).
To complement Edmund’s comment, the Catholic Church established a long list of “canonical ages” for various capabilities or responsabilities (for instance 7 for being able to distinguish good from evil, hence commit sins).
PS. for thenewsexualorder: My avatar is not a teenager, see the picture and comments on my blog, she is probably 11 or 12, she would not be “adult” in ancient society. If you reject adulthood for teenagers on the ground that “adults” are sexually repulsive and forbidden to other “adults”, you can modify your criterion, and say that sex is repulsive between adults aged more than X years.

His name was Shame

Shes girl from ICeland, perhaps, because she’s certianly Nordic.

thenewsexualorder

Christian, I do not live in ancient society, alive today. The thoughts of ancient societies is me irrelevant, same as the opinion of modern society is irrelevant to me too. Really you care about the opinion of religious Jews and Christians? if you reject religion directly, also you should turning away its archaic conception of youth by religion.
If adolescence is from the post-puberty to up, no problem, we look for another better word, you know about that, do not matter what “word” exactly, but in puberty are not children… if I am a younglover instead of a teen lover really I do not care, but neither are adults, and not because the taste for between adults is “wrong”, but because they pubescents are not adults, biology is not everything, again this the spiritual part, they DON’T have (in theory, today’s society degenerates everyone equally) the soul contaminated like the adult, pubescents can be half-adults half-child in soul and body, so I simply call them adolescents, only that.
And as you see, I does not need to write all my speech that makes me look like a religious nut. I am intelligent too.

A.

If I recall correctly, among the Anglo-Saxons a boy became old enough to be counted as a man at 12.
I became able to think abstractly at 12 and I crossed a big maturity threshold at 24. I have noticed that at around 10 kids do often have a big jump in ability to understand and cope with the world. But development’s not always strictly linear. In a lot of ways I was more steady and self-possessed at 10 than at 15, because at 15 I had more to cope with, not least because my understanding was better than it had been when I was 10. I expect that’s not unusual.

thenewsexualorder

It can not be, because the sexual attraction for adults is an engram and with my therapy I had stopped liking me the teenagers if they were “young adults”, I do not care mainstream science and the pre-industrial societies, also in all preindustrial societies believe in religions, and you reject them. And they were just a degenerate pagan societies, as the Romans who nailed to people in crosses, I do not care them their opinion about adolescence, they are the past, humanity must get over it.
The truth is that the pubescens are not children, but are adolescents, teenagers or young or as you want to call it, but never one “young adult” because then my hebephilia would be a teleiophilic perversion… and love a teen girl never would be a perversion!
Just look at the beautiful teen girl of your avatar (which I like so much, you know), that is not “young adult” even remotely, an adult (with their teleiophilic engram not annulled) is despicable and repulsive by nature, a child killer and sexual pervert by nature, but she did not, she would be a good mother and a better wife, the mainstream godless pro-teleiophile “science” is not part of my beliefs. Sorry, I prefer not lie to you.

Edmund

“I do not care them their opinion about adolescence, they are the past, humanity must get over it.”
The practical value of history to the present is that we can see what worked well (often better than things are done today) and what did not. Or do you think all experience is useless?

A.

At 14, my friends and I still very much felt like children. Not at 16, though. But everyone develops at a different rate.
It’s common for women recalling their first period to say that they were frightened and upset by all the ‘you’re a woman now’ stuff, because they still felt like little girls and wanted to run around and play with their friends and cuddle their teddies. Some were delighted to feel so grown up, but my impression is that they were not the majority. So I feel that — in this culture, here, now, obviously I can’t speak about anybody else’s society — we need to cut back on the Dawning Womanhood guff in those puberty videos they show in schools, especially since there are a fair few 10-year-olds these days having to deal with periods and bras (poor kids! I feel lucky not to have had to at that age).
When I was 12 I had the misfortune to encounter a fool of a minor school administrator who told us that 12-18 year olds were not children but young adults. This got right on my incipient tits. I pointed out that if young adulthood is over at 18, we’d be middle-aged from then on, which is obviously not the case! Also I could tell, because though 12 I was not stupid, that she was trying to make us think we were being respected and taken seriously but that in fact we were not being respected or taken seriously in any way that mattered.
To be fair, though, the ’12-18 is young adulthood’ thing is now enshrined in US children’s book marketing categories and this has had some good results. One of Philip Pullman’s novels for adolescents includes an explicit sex scene between a girl and boy of 17. In the UK it’s considered a children’s book and so he had to tone the sex scene down a bit. In the US it’s a ‘young adult’ book and so the sex scene was left unexpurgated.

thenewsexualorder

The opinion of the people and society do not care me at all. The Truth is: from puberty (usually 10-11 years) are adolescents, not children, and at the end of puberty are adults. From puberty, as they are teenagers, not children or “kids”, can have sex, marry and have children (with others adults, of course), if modern day pubescents want, or society encourages them to remain children, too bad, because it is not, is unnatural. Pubescent are not children, never are and never will be children, are teenagers or young adults, and are to have the menses, and marry and have sex (with adults), is biology, period.

A.

I use ‘kids’ loosely, often to mean people who are too old to be called little boys or girls but too young to be called adults. I feel sure it is not insulting, as I have heard many late high-schoolers call themselves kids.
In my personal semantics late childhood and early adolescence overlap. But that’s all it is, my personal semantics.
And I would be inclined to argue that a girl of nine who already has breasts is probably not adolescent *mentally*, as opposed to physically, whereas a girl of twelve who doesn’t have any yet is probably already mentally adolescent.

A.

PS I don’t want to rain on your parade, honest, but while the health implications of teenage pregnancy are still being debated among medics, all the studies I’ve read on the subject are quite clear about two things:
— 18- and 19-year-olds giving birth are not at increased risk of complications. Indeed, on some measures they may tend to have slightly better health outcomes than older women.
— We have relatively little data on people who give birth when they are under 15. However, what we do have indicates strongly that they are at greatly increased risk of all kinds of complications, as are the resultant babies, and that this is due to their young age, not to adverse social or economic factors (though adverse social and economic factors certainly make things worse).
Not trying to start a big argument so will leave it at that.

gordonk

We’re lucky here in the US in that most mascots are adults or at least late teens. The mascot has long ago been turned from a good luck charm into a marketing tool. The scandals here involve drunken and or horny mascots getting involved in after game extra curricular action unbecoming or else asking for more money and getting sacked.
The only involvement of children is for them to want to buy the soft plushy toy for $30 dollars after the game.

L

There may be different ways of persuading the gods to smile. The little lad with leukaemia, or the very fat kid, might appeal to them by showing the team’s big heart. The team brings luck to the mascots: let the gods bring luck to the team!
To the less superstitious, they can bring other advantages. It has been reported that some UK soccer clubs charge up to £600 to become a mascot.
But gods can have any motivation you wish to imagine. It needn’t even be internally consistent. And traditions with different origins and motivations can become blended.
I too didn’t find any authoritative history via Google, but I did find a comment from an ex-mascot, suggesting that troupes of child mascots may have become common in US soccer in the 1970s as a way of promoting among children what was then rather a little-known game. These mascots would sometimes even play a short match themselves before the main fixture, thus entangling the mascot tradition with the separate tradition of the opening exhibition match.
Of course, even if true, it doesn’t imply a 1970s US genesis. But it does suggest lines of enquiry if you’re interested.

stephen6000

I always assumed those kids accompanying the players as they came out of the tunnel were their own children! Thanks for enlightening me. The truth of course is much more interesting.

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