When some of my good friends would meet me, they would sometimes say, “How are ya, ya old fucker!” One night when my dad came home from work, I ran and greeted him by saying, “How are you, Dad, you old fucker!” This occasion marked the beginning of my sex education!

Half a century ago, when this anecdote about a preteen boy’s hilarious (or potentially disastrous) social blunder appeared in a pioneering book on the sex life of children, everyone knew you just didn’t talk to your father that way. But if you didn’t even know WTF the word “fuck” meant, as this one plainly didn’t, you were always going to be at risk of putting your foot in it, weren’t you?

Same thing happened to me. Within earshot of Dad at home I shouted out “What a daft twat!”, possibly at some clown on the telly. In an ominously solemn tone Dad asked where I had heard that word, and whether I knew what it meant. Of course, I hadn’t known what a “twat” was and found myself deeply embarrassed to discover it was a “rude” word for a lady’s “private parts”. Convinced of my innocence (aka ignorance), Dad simply said I was never to use the word again. And that was that.

As far as I can remember, that was the only occasion in my entire childhood when anything of a sexual nature was mentioned at home other than me being given the message in very early childhood that certain body areas should always be covered, and that words associated with them were forbidden. My parents were very loving and I am sure I benefitted hugely from growing up as part of a stable family. But the sexual reticence of their era was not at all helpful.

Such thoughts must have occurred to Floyd M. Martinson, whose book Infant and Child Sexuality: A Sociological Perspective, appeared in 1973. It includes the quotation above as part of its extensive use of interviews with young adults about their early sex lives and its social context. I intended to blog about his work three years ago but found myself sidetracked into writing here about two other sex research pioneers of that era, Ernest Borneman and Carlfred Broderick. Prompted by our erudite regular commentator Prue Cordell, who asked at the time why I had left out Martinson, I have now finally managed to get back on track.

So, let me tell you about the guy. Martinson was a professor of sociology for an astonishing 55 years, from 1945 until his death in 2000, at just one institution, Gustavus Adolphus College, Minnesota, a liberal arts college in his native state, associated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. After his first couple of decades in the job he must have been seen as an institution in himself, part of the fabric of the place. Having also grown up and been educated entirely within the state, his local roots ran very deep. Like the college itself, he was a pillar of the Lutheran Church, with a stable family life from 1946 onwards when he married his wife Beatrice, a match that gave them five children. Such stability would have made him a man trusted enough to handle such a controversial research subject as child sexuality.

His apparent contentment to stay locally well grounded comes as no surprise when we learn that his youth had been spent on far less solid terrain, in the most literal sense. Born in 1916, he had been a farm boy in hard times, when agriculture in the Midwest was hit by a devastating double whammy: the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, a draught era lasting well over a decade, with dry, windy conditions that blew away the topsoil. Many will be familiar with the tragic story, as I was, from John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath and its film version, but I had no idea things were bad as far north as Minnesota. As Martinson writes in a memoir:

I remember the air was filled with dry-as-dust topsoil blowing across the fields, depositing itself like snow drifts along field fences. Great balls of tumbleweeds rolled across the dry, crusty bottom of what had been Buffalo Lake. I remember a day when we were cutting our sparse crops. Dad was riding the tractor, the lugs kicked up clouds of dust, and I was riding the binder, sweat and dust covering me. Grasshoppers, attracted by the salt and sweat, sat on my back and ate holes in my shirt. It was a time that left a lasting impression on a teenager.

Thanks to the hardscrabble living, it was touch and go whether he ever went to high school, never mind college. After school he had to put in four more years on the farm before majoring in economics at a small college. While there, he discovered that rural sociologists were in demand. Later, he would graduate in that subject from the University of Minnesota.

His move towards researching the sociology of sex was gradual, starting with his PhD thesis at Gustavus Adolphus on rural-to-urban migration, when he noticed that students who married soon after graduating from high school had low scores on social and emotional adjustment, a finding that contradicted the conventional wisdom of the day. He wrote an article about it for the American Sociological Review titled “Ego deficiency as a factor in marriage”, which quickly drew the attention of the New York Times. Their scandalised reporter demanded to know what he had got against marriage!

From this experience, and from student feedback, he realised there was a keen interest in marriage and family life, which he accordingly began to focus on in his teaching and writing, leading eventually to two books, Marriage and the American Ideal (1960) and Family in Society (1970). The focus on child sexuality came accidentally, as he puts it, after developing a course on the theme of “sexual culture and sexual socialisation in our sex-inhibited society”. By this time he was a director of the Lutheran Social Service, which was much exercised with the problem of schoolgirls falling pregnant. As a research method, Martinson engaged his undergraduate students as a volunteer army. They were sent out to ask “What is it like to grow up in your community?”, with the implicit task of finding out “What is it like to grow up sexually in your community?”.

The big breakthrough, though, came in connection with his students’ library research for essays dealing with subjects such as mate selection, marriage, divorce, reproduction, and cross-cultural differences. After a number of years, he says, “I introduced an alternative paper theme that literally changed my professional interest. I suggested to students that they could write on some aspects of their own life experience, which they would describe and analyse utilising concepts introduced in the course.” To his surprise, many wrote on sexual experiences that had occurred very early in their lives.

Thus began his gathering of over one thousand sex histories, a sample of which were drawn on thematically in Infant and Child Sexuality, along with case material from interviews with 200 unmarried mothers, and in the general community. He also drew on previously unpublished data from Alfred Kinsey’s interview notes on a sample of children two to five years of age.

The conceptual framework of the book is sociological, focusing on the affectional and sexual encounters of the young with others, including adults. He noted that most of the earlier work in the field had been number crunching, reporting on the incidence of various sexual phenomena. And most surveys in question had been about teenagers rather than younger children. He sought to rectify this imbalance, and instead of presenting lots of statistics (“quantitative” research), his work would be more “qualitative”. Surveys designed to discover hard facts and figures, he  said, are valuable in showing how prevalent various kinds of behavior are; but, taken alone, they oversimplify the picture. They tell us little or nothing about how the subjects, in this case the children, define and experience their situations.

You need to take a good look at such experiences and how children see them. Only by taking their responses into account does it become possible to think intelligently about public policy on such matters as sex education, in the home and at school, and when/whether permissive or restrictive approaches to sexual behaviour will work. Without such information it is all too easy to focus on misconceived questions based on premature theorising, leading to poor quality quantitative research. The latter can give the illusion of being based on “hard facts” while actually being very misleading.

One such weak theory, Freud’s notion that sexuality is dormant, or “latent” in the prepubertal years from 7-11, is significantly undermined by the rich narratives of sexual feelings and behaviours that Martinson sets forth from children in this age bracket, although he divides key age ranges slightly differently. His book has three main sections, separately considering Infancy (0-2); Early Childhood (3-7); and Preadolescence (8-12).

Commonly, of course, children’s preteen sexual feelings are denied far more comprehensively than Freud ever did, famous as he was for advancing a theory of infantile sexuality. In this regard, Martinson could hardly ask babies to describe their experiences, and adults typically remember nothing at all of their own infancy. As with all his three sections, though, he drew extensively on all available sources of information, including mothers’ observations, and earlier formal research from such figures as Kinsey, Broderick and Glenn Ramsey. The result was a book that brought new and earlier material together in a compelling way.

Boy babies, he noted, are sometimes born with erections, “and there is no reason to believe that the capacity for such marked physiological response develops any later in girls”. In a study of nine male babies of ages three to twenty weeks, penile erection was observed at least once daily in seven of the nine. Individual responses varied greatly from five to forty erections per day.

Pelvic thrust movements in male and female infants eight to ten months old “appear to occur as part of an expression of affection in which the baby holds onto the parent, nuzzles the parent, and rapidly thrusts and rotates the pelvis for a few seconds”. Kinsey, he noted, reported one record of a seven-month-old infant and records of five infants under one year who were observed to masturbate. Twenty-three girls, three years or younger, appeared to reach orgasm in self stimulation. Kinsey’s unpublished interview data includes a sample of two-year-olds and their mothers. One mother reported that her son used to rub against a doll’s head to masturbate. Another reported that her son’s masturbating was deliberate, prolonged, and accompanied by an erection.

The first evidence of love appears in Early Childhood (3-7), Martinson tells us. Based on work by Sanford Bell, it is characterised as “spontaneous, profuse, and unrestrained”. Bell gives many examples. It is tempting to quote lots of them, but I’ll stick with just the one:

My nephew of three manifested an ardent passion for a small girl of about the same age. He followed her about with dog-like persistence. Being an only child he was very selfish, never sharing anything with other children. But Bessie became the recipient of all his playthings. His hoard of treasures was laid at her feet. Nothing was good enough for her, nor could he be dressed fine enough when she was around. On one occasion, a large boy picked Bessie up to fondle her, whereupon her jealous lover seized a hatchet and attacked his rival. He imperiously demanded a dollar from me one day in order that he might buy Bessie and have her “all for his own”. He is now six, and loves her as much as ever.

Innocent passion? We would be innocent to think so in the light of recollections by Martinson’s informants. These include reports of specifically sexual feelings in very early childhood, in both individual and social contexts, as seen in these three examples:

The first time I can recall having a sexually pleasing sensation was when I was around three or four. I remember feeling very proud of what I had learned (how to masturbate) and the strange sensation it aroused.

**

My neighbourhood environment has always been quite permissive which enabled me (a boy) the time and freedom to become the finest five-year-old doctor in my neighbourhood. I clearly remember associating my penile erections with examination of the next door girl’s anatomy.

**

In first grade, I can remember my first actual erection. I was sitting on my teacher’s lap, but was neither ashamed nor embarrassed at the small bulge in my pants.

As hinted in the last of these examples, and as Martinson acknowledges, the child is sometimes the initiator or provoker in child-adult sexual encounters, and “may seek a form of satisfaction which is given through an affectional-sexual encounter.”

Also hinted at here (the “quite permissive” environment of the five-year-old “doctor”), social circumstances count for a lot. The latency theory of later preadolescent childhood, to the extent that any facts support it, probably just reflects older kids’ sensible caution in making sure potentially disapproving adults do not see what they are up to – inhibitions that will only have strengthened in our present era, obsessed as it is with “protecting” children, even from their own sexuality.

Not that even the 1970s were as relaxed on the subject as is sometimes suggested. It is no accident that Martinson found publishers for his many other books but not this one, which was published privately after being turned down by 29 firms. As he wryly notes, “All thought that it should be published, but each thought that some other publisher should have the privilege!” Even this book made it eventually, though, when it was brought out in 1994 as The Sexual Life of Children, with extensive revisions in the light of further research. This time it was taken on by a venerable old (established 1612) publishing house, Bergin and Garvey, suggesting that the author’s national, and indeed international, reputation had been secured by this time.

This is confirmed by the fact that in 1980 he was honoured with a prestigious Fulbright Research Scholarship to study child sexuality in the more liberal climate of Sweden, and among several major awards he won was the Alfred C. Kinsey Award in 1988.

The emphasis today has been on Martinson’s personal story; my introduction of his research data has been relatively constrained. The latter can be explored more thoroughly in a free full-text PDF of Infant and Child Sexuality here.

YOUR PAEDO TEACHER MIGHT BE YOUR BEST ONE

The last time I had occasion to mention Giles Coren, humourist and restaurant critic, was over his trenchant and constructive analysis early this year of childhood obesity and what to do about it. Now, in another of his regular columns for The Times, he has cautiously ventured onto more dangerous childhood terrain, with a significantly less than totally damning view of paedophilia.

The theme of the column a couple of weeks ago was the start of the new school year. Headed “Everything you need to know about big school”, the article (paywalled, but it is available in full at Wayback Machine) gave jokey advice to kids, including about teachers who might have the hots for them. It was couched as a warning, as you might expect, but note the relative gentleness of the tone:

The teacher you think is a paedophile is a paedophile. It is not necessarily anything to be afraid of, but don’t be shy to believe it of them. My favourite teacher, who taught me how to write but also touched me in unwelcome ways and was the subject of insinuating graffiti and chants, was later, to nobody’s surprise, convicted of (quite minor) sexual offences against children. Indeed, both my children have already had a favourite teacher arrested, charged, convicted and defenestrated for (again, quite minor) sexual offences. Lots of schools have no paedophiles at all any more. But some do. It’s just a fact of life. So if there is a general consensus among the kids that that teacher is a wrong ‘un, he probably is.

Tell me I’m wrong if you want, but it looks to me as though he thinks a “wrong ‘un” might still be worth having as a teacher even if they are a bit naughty – indeed, they might be preferred to the less friendly “well behaved” types!

YOU CAN’T TRUMP THIS FOR TOPICAL RELEVANCE

Any MAP who is keen to know the track records of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump on sex offender policy ahead of the US presidential election would do well to read a new article from the Percy Foundation.

Titled “The Cop vs. the Predator: Harris, Trump, and the Politics of Sexual Menace”, the piece is remarkably even-handed, with deep analysis and extensive sourcing.

While I am no fan of Trump, and I am sure I would never vote for him if I had American citizenship, any enthusiasm I might have been able to find for Harris as an improvement on doddery Joe Biden was not exactly enhanced by this read.

As for Trump’s record, we all know his reputation as a groper, but not everyone will be aware of his endorsement of Tim Ballard, the discredited former CEO of the anti-sex trafficking organisation “Operation Underground Railroad” (OUR), whose outrageous witch hunting was responsible (along with another such organisation) for the unjust incarceration of three Dutch former MAP activists, as reported by HTOC.

The article also presents an interesting theory as to why Trump’s evangelical Christian supporters do not appear to be all that bothered by the ex-president’s own record as a convicted felon.

TERRIBLE NEWS FROM ECUADOR

Former MAP activist Marthijn Uittenbogaard and his partner Lesley, arrested in June 2022 in Ecuador and sentenced on baseless charges to 10-year prison terms after a vicious campaign of lies orchestrated by Tim Ballard (see above), were hoping for better news from their long delayed appeal.

Sadly, it was not to be. As reported on Newgon, the appeal was heard a few days ago, when the trial judge’s ruling was upheld. According to the lawyers, the court did not listen to their defence.

I will not dwell at length on the horrific back story, which has been regularly updated at the Newgon link. I will just briefly note that these guys have been subjected to many episodes of extreme violence, against a constant background of terror and deprivation; half starved to death and brutalised, they have been clinging on in nightmarish, hellhole conditions.

As for Ballard, who ought to have been utterly discredited, he appears to be carrying on as though nothing has happened – rather like Trump following his criminal convictions. The one bit of good news (or better than horrific, at least) is that Marthijn and Lesley were transferred at their own request last month to an “LGBTQ-friendly” department, which should in theory be safer. The full Newgon reports are quite lengthy. For a quick catch-up, see the following dated entries:

Ballard and OUR:             17 Sep 2023; 31 Jul 2024

Prison conditions:           9 Jan 2024; 13 Jan; 21 Jan; 11 Mar; 21 Mar; 28 Jul; 15 Aug

Legal:                                    22 Jun; 3 Jul; 12 Jul; 15 Jul; 9 Sep; 13 Sep