Get that image of kids as little angels out of your head: child-rearing is war. And that’s not just a metaphor. More and more parents are actually getting beaten up by their kids. While you’re waiting for her to get old enough for you to legitimately give her a smack, your little sweetie will have you repeating things like, “Stand up straight,” “Don’t put dirty napkins on the table,” “Chew with your mouth closed,” “Clean up your room,” “Pick up your dirty things,” “Do your homework.” The child, testing her power over you, will deliberately harass you until you’re right at the edge. If you are raising several of them, it’s double or triple indemnity, especially in blended families, which are said to represent “modernity” for lack of a more meaningful word. For a woman, this means raising not only her own children but also at least one of someone else’s. Why don’t we have vacation resorts for them while we’re at it?
The worst thing is that children do everything possible to prevent you from having fun. That is the child’s hidden face. And believe me, he is going to prove very inventive in this area. Just when you’re finally about to escape for a night out, he’ll get sick. He’ll stop you from celebrating your birthday with your friends. He detests it when you bring a stranger home to spend the night – male or female. As for actually dating, don’t even think about it if you don’t want to traumatize the little darling. Children have an uncanny sixth sense: they know precisely when to start screaming, just as you’re getting intimate with your boyfriend or girlfriend – assuming they’re sleeping in their own rooms. Many kids today share their parents’ beds. Twelve per cent of American parents admit to spending the night with their baby.*1 I highly doubt those parents’ sex lives are anything to speak of. Goodbye, caresses; hello, sadness.
What could be more intolerable for a child alone in bed than imagining his mother and father making love in theirs? It’s unthinkable. Moreover, it is probably the origin of the myth Freud invented for his Totem and Taboo, the son killing his father because of the good life he is leading – the bastard, with all those women, it’s a scandal, it’s unacceptable!*2 Up until the ’70s, parents paid their children back in kind by enforcing strict but reasonable sexual restrictions: no intercourse before marriage, no hanky-panky before evening prayers. The sex lives of young people, especially girls, were rigidly controlled. But after all, that was only fair – tit for tat. You keep me from living my life, I’ll put some serious limits on your liberty. It’s war.
Sexual repression was never just about fear of unwanted pregnancy. For almost the whole of the 19th century, parents and teachers joined together in their struggle against an atrocious scourge: child masturbation. It was said to undermine children’s health and leave them exhausted. It’s hard to understand today how jerking off scared society so much back then, but let’s try an explanation all the same. This fear is related to an enduring and powerful principle: one is not good, but two is okay. Based on this same principle, cloning is to reproduction what masturbation is to sex. Have erotic pleasure alone? Make a baby out of only your own genes? They’re the same scandal. But why are they scandalous? Because it is not advisable to do alone what you could (and should) be doing with another. What a great way to force someone into a couple, someone who, left to herself, might well evade the fundamental needs of society by refusing – horror! – to reproduce. What does this have to do with children? The soothing and protective language society uses on that subject is a thin disguise for the subtext: Forward, march!
Ever since the Raëlians announced their so-called cloned baby, in 2002, the press has been talking about the “violation of all the laws against experimenting on humans” and the “irreversible that will inevitably follow,” the “abomination, the monstrosity of this assault on morality.” Why is it so shocking that a baby would be its mother’s clone? Let’s be serious. We’re all clones already, not of one of our parents but of our neighbours and colleagues. The line is no longer “Love one another” but “Be just like one another.” It’s like tomatoes or green peas or potatoes: everything has to be exactly the same size in order to fit in the little boxes.
*1 According to a study by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, it’s got to the point where more and more American parents are visiting sleep consultants to try to get their children used to sleeping alone.
*2 My reading of Totem and Taboo is not very orthodox, I have to confess. (The reader may be more used to the following reading: In Totem and Taboo, Freud explains that the murder of the father, followed by a cannibal feast, was meant not only to prevent incest but also to give birth to relationships based on man-woman exchanges. Furthermore, it also laid the foundations of all religions, which celebrate, symbolically, the murder and devouring of the father.)