Tracking the loss of innocence

[tory]

Reading the Illustrated History of the Second World War the other night in bed to my son, he turned round, apropos of nothing, and said "Daddy, what's Necrophilia?"

I said "Where did you hear or see that word?"

"In the Oxford Dictionary at School".

"Do you know what it means?"

"It said "people who are sexually attracted to dead bodies"

"That's correct."

"That's well weird"

"Yes, son, it is extremely weird and wrong."

[Sneelock]

yes, there are many wrong things and there are words for them.

[tory]

My aim with this thread was more a "moments when you sensed a loss in your child's innocence or yours".

There's still a long way to go with mine it has to be said. He's pretty innocent.

I remember encountering hardcore pornography for the first time on a Scouts trip to Arnhem in Holland - would have been 1985. A few discarded magazines found in a forest on the edge of our camp site - and definitely not softcore....

[davey]

I had to tell my six-year-old daughter that her best friend (hard to even know who is your best friend at six…but the little girl she played with most often) had been killed in a car accident.

It was a terrible, terrible feeling. I felt like I was literally stealing some part of her innocence. But it had to be done.

[adamcoan]

Jesus Davey. That's too awful for words. Is she ok, did she understand?

[fearlessfreap]

When I was in first grade, a kid in my class had leukemia. He had to wear a wig and some of the older kids in school- 6th graders would steal his wig and play keep away with it. What could we do, they were older and bigger than us. The kid eventually stopped coming to school and we found out he died at the end of the year. This was what told me that life isn’t fair and that people are absolute shit. Two of the bigger kids are now in state prison for murder.

[Sneelock]

Not as bad as freap but similar. I got “hazed”;a lot. I usually wouldn’t bring it up to grown ups unless asked about bruises. Once I went to the P.E. Teacher,both my knees bloody from being dog-piled on -on blacktop while wearing shorts. I asked if they could ask the other kids to stop doing this.The P.E. Teacher told me to “stop being a pussy.”

My own kids & siblings have all had the  crushing blow of someone who had been kind becoming cruel it’s a harsh lesson & takes some magic out of the world.

As for sex stuff. I’d seen “girlie magazines” like Playboy. I understood that people liked to look at pretty naked girls. I found a stash of Hustler type magazines once and I couldn’t bear to look at them. It was mildly traumatizing in a way.

So, deliberate cruelty struck a blow. Indifference to casual cruelty struck another. Pictures of women that seemed deliberately unpleasant and offensive didn’t make any sense to me at all.

[souphound]

About a week before my seventh birthday, my paternal grandparents died in a car crash. To this day I still remember how destroyed my father looked while breaking the news to me. It's the only time I ever saw him cry.

It taught me how even the dearest people can just be taken from your life just like that, instantaneously and unpredictably. With that in mind, it has helped me understand (after lots of time passed by of course) that it's important to appreciate all the moments you have with special ones while they are happening. Memories are nice but the present can be priceless if you make it so.

[davey]

Jan 28, 2024 17:41:10 GMT adamcoan said:

Jesus Davey. That's too awful for words. Is she ok, did she understand?

I’m not sure that I know. I mean, she coped as well as could be expected from all I could tell. She’s a young adult now with some problems and some strengths - hard to know how she might be different if it hadn’t happened.

It certainly traumatized me to have to tell her.

[quaco]

I learned about concepts like necrophilia, beastiality, etc. etc. from Tom Lehrer and Monty Python records and didn't feel any loss of innocence. It was funny and I understood it was not something I was interested in doing myself. A lot of things are part of the child growing, it's an ongoing process. There was also playing with matches, nascent sexual thoughts and play, injuries, betrayals by friends, deaths, etc. I think it's hard to say from the outside which things are going to turn out to have been significant in the child's loss of innocence, so it makes it hard to say. Plus a certain amount of loss of innocence is desirable. Certainly I wouldn't wish trauma on any kid (and I appreciate you sharing some of what you've had to go through) but I wouldn't give up my first probably-too-young viewings of A Clockwork Orange or Performance for anything, whereas I know kids who were disturbed by those things.

[loveless]

It's...slightly difficult to admit how stubbornly and fully I held on to general naivete and innocence, but...for the most part, I'd say I carried it well into early adulthood (and, in some cases, beyond). And while it's accurate to say that I'd have done this, that and the other differently, and occasioned different outcomes with a more knowing and worldly point of view (certainly in some crucial years), it's not really anything to dwell on (any more than not liking your own face or something).

I mean, I dunno...I had unfortunate experiences that would assuredly qualify as traumatic by any metric (explicit enough that I'm not naming them), I grew up in a time where 5 year olds saw Tommy, Network, Cuckoo's Nest, The Tin Drum, The Shining, etc. in the theater (and on HBO at 10), there was bullying, there were betrayals by friends, teen drug and alcohol experiences, saw Faces of Death AND ran away from home at 17...and yet, there was always some version of a system in place that allowed me to retain a certain extra-strength innocence. From my own point of view, that seems like...you know, it's a virtue in some ways (creatively, maybe), but...there's a hell of a cost, and I hesitate to say that it is in any way preferable to a more typical or common amount of scarring. I guess things LIKE necrophilia and bestiality (and...you know...the sort of Psychic TV/Butthole Surfers type "acid burnout" guys I knew in high school and college - some combination of grew up too fast and/or never grew up - and whatever the fuck they got into)...it was like...I knew there was ugliness in the world, but...it couldn't have had less to do with me.

My kids...I wonder...for them it's been a lot of dead relatives (I'm an old dad), but...I think, if possible that may have normalized loss in a way that I don't even know how to feel about (I'm not trying to "put hair on their chests" or anything like that, but...people struggle mightily with the very concept, so...you know, you want them to have "a healthy foundation", I guess?). You wonder what an 11/12 year old got out of Breaking Bad (and then Saul), in terms of...any number of things...watching their parents deal with substance abuse/psychological issues (as I suppose I did with both of mine as well)...all of this mostly leads me to conclude that, if not exactly "you see what you wanna see and you hear what you wanna hear", there is something about the person and their perceptive/interpretive bias/inclination that really seems to carry enormous relevance here. If that makes sense.

They haven't had the types of experiences that Davey or souphound describes, and...you wince a little to know that their own versions of these traumas are assuredly lying in wait (while also being deeply thankful that they may be more equipped by virtue of relative "calendar maturity").

I worry about shit like them having initial romantic/relationship heartbreaks and disappointments (and, yes, this is a common refrain among other parents I know/have known) - I mean, if I remember my own life with any accuracy, that seemed tougher than most things. It's a hell of a thing to admit, but...it also seems more universal than I'd have expected.

[davey]

I just don’t think there is any right pace with which to encounter the adult world.

While I appreciate the intent of the original post, one thing that I think the subsequent responses establish is that there are a LOT more threatening forces to a child’s innocence than early awareness of sexual terminology and concepts. It strikes me as a bit weird that we so often focus on it.

I think I can fairly say that my childhood was extreme in this respect. My parents were pretty off the charts. Mom was a sexologist. Dad was a gynecologist. Until their divorce they conducted theirs as an open marriage, taking very little care to be discreet. We had an early Betamax machine with copies of Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door just laying around. A good portion of Summer weekends were spent at a nudist colony.

I could keep going. It was, admittedly… weird.

There were plenty of other areas not related to sex where my particular innocence was challenged. I remember seeing The Exorcist in the theater TWICE (age 8), Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia at a drive-in in my pajamas. I sat in circles with folks smoking pot and had the joint passed to me (by my father) when I was nine.

That’s just a few highlights of the stuff I could lay at my parents feet. There’s a whole personal file of darker shit I won’t share here.

Then there’s the contextual shit. The stuff happening all around. The video on tv coming in from the Vietnam war. The cynicism of Watergate. The long Manson hangover in Los Angeles and our culture. The drug culture. Hustler. Swank. The shit we’d see every time we went to Hollywood Blvd. At 15 I took one of my first dates ever to see Caligula…. that was an innocence-stealing two-fer. Also, being Jewish, there was the spectre of the holocaust. All of that newsreel footage of emaciated bodies. All of those descriptions of cruelty - told to me with the implicit understanding that I would have been a victim myself were it not for fortune.

My point in all of this disclosure is not to say, “but hey…I turned out fine” (personality quirks notwithstanding, I basically did). But rather to point out that none of that actually “stole” my innocence. I turned 59 last week and I’m still pretty wide-eyed about the world. I can still access all of the wonder and optimism of my earliest memories…before any of the above had occurred.

You can’t really guard another person’s innocence. You can try to nurture it. You can be mindful of what you expose them to. But their innocence isn’t yours to control.

We were pretty careful with our daughter. Our house was pretty Ozzy & Harriet compared to the one I grew up in. But my daughter is no less worldly than I was at her age. Life happens its own way.

[Stacy Heydon]

Reading all the above, I think we probably were a lot more innocent in the UK.

[souphound]

Feb 1, 2024 23:29:12 GMT Stacy Heydon said:

Reading all the above, I think we probably were a lot more innocent in the UK.

And in Canada, eh?