As the TV shows get ever more risque, our sexually conflicted society gets even crazier. A four-year old in Texas was suspended for
"inappropriate physical behavior interpreted as sexual contact and/or sexual harassment."
The offending action? Either a hug or else "rubbing his face in the chest of a female employee," depending on who's describing.
More after the fold.
As a psychoanalyst, it's upsetting that the parent's fight against this absurd school department behavior has to be fought using the concept of sexual innocence:
Blackwell says it's ridiculous that the aide would misread a hug from a four-year-old. Blackwell wrote to administrators demanding that the whole incident be expunged from his son's academic file because his son is too young to know what it means to act sexually.
David Davis, the executive director of the Advocacy Center in Waco tends to agree with Blackwell. He says assuming the boy has not had sexual encounters, or been inappropriately exposed to pornography, most four-year-olds are sexually innocent.
One hundred years after Freud, we still need the cultural defense of pretending that children are innocent. They must have no "sexual" desires. Once we grant them the existence of desires, they are not safe from the thought police taking over in our schools. So, at age four the choice really is innocence or guilt.
By the way, the school administration is holding firm:
Blackwell got a response from the La Vega administration. The sexual references on the discipline referral were removed. But the thing that makes Blackwell most upset is they told him "your request for an apology by the aide and removal of all paperwork regarding this incident is denied." Now the young student's file will refer to the incident as "inappropriate physical contact."
Perhaps, if he does it again, they'll send him to Guantanamo.