CHILDHOOD SEXUALITY: GENITAL PLAY—MASTURBATION
Spitz makes an important distinction between genital play and masturbation in infancy. He observes that infants in the first year of life generally are not capable of the direct, volitional behavior required for what we call the masturbatory act or masturbation. Any more or less random play with various parts of the body, including the genitals, is nonspecific activity and should be labeled as genital play and not as masturbation.
Yet some infants do specifically stimulate themselves sexually. Kinsey reports 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 through self-stimulation. Kinsey’s unpublished interview data contains notations from interviews with a small sample of two-year-olds and their mothers. One mother reported that her son had the habit of rubbing against a doll’s head to masturbate. Another reported that her son’s masturbating was deliberate, prolonged, and accompanied by an erection. Cuddling and kissing parents and others was reported for both boys and girls.
Kinsey reported more records of small girls than of small boys masturbating to orgasm at an early age. This does not agree with the finding of Levy. Levy reports that direct stimulation of the genitals in over half of a group of boys under three years of age whose mothers were interviewed by him, as contrasting with only four out of twenty-six girls. Koch, like Levy, reports more masturbation among infant boys than among infant girls.
It cannot be assumed that behavior that appears to be erotic to adults is actually erotic in the consciousness of the infant, since the infant lacks the well developed erotic imagery available and so important to adult sexual activity. Also in the sexual realm, sociocultural influences come to modify and interpret biological influences so that a straight-line developmental continuity from infancy to maturity cannot be assumed (Simon and Gagnon, March). In societies with a tolerant and permissive attitude toward erotic expression in infancy, fingering the genitals becomes an occasional but established habit (Ford and Beach). One example is that of the Marquesa. Sex play was common practice from the earliest ages among the Marquesa and not only tolerated but encouraged. The recognized the erotic impulse in childhood and accorded it the right of free exercise. They eroticized the child by masturbating it to keep it quiet. In the case of the girls, labia were manipulated as a placebo and also to encourage the growth of large labia, which to the Marquesans were a mark of beauty. Such activity was, no doubt, also erotically stimulating. Then was social recognition of all sexual activity in childhood, and there were no restrictions against engaging in it freely; it was allocated the same place in the child’s world as it occupied in the adult’s.
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