I watch my wife as she snuggles and kisses and playfully fondles our son's body, eliciting from him giggles of delight, and I wonder how he experiences the attention she pays to his penis. Not that there's even a hint of anything inappropriately sexual in the way she touches him, and not that I have any fear about her crossing the line into inappropriateness, but so much of adult sexuality, especially adult male sexuality, is focused on our genitals, and so unthinkingly do we impose the norms and values of adult sexuality on the eroticism of children—which we fear but do not want to admit that we fear—that it's almost impossible not to see in the way my wife plays with my son the shadow of what it would mean if the way she touched him ever did become inappropriate. As Rosalind Miles suggests, however, appropriateness—which is always a matter of culture anyway—may be entirely beside the point. A mother's touch on her son's genitals, she writes, with the understanding that she's talking about something other than an act of cleansing or instruction in personal hygiene, "does not merely awaken the male sense of self, but locates it, ensuring that for the rest of his life his penis incorporates his essence and identity: that he is his penis."1
I watch my wife and my son and I think how easy it is to think Miles is right. My son plays a game, for example, in which he sits naked on my wife's face, clearly a strategy for getting his penis as close to her mouth as possible, and there are other times when he has asked openly for her to kiss him there, but then I remember that she also pays a great deal of attention to and that he asks her regularly to kiss and snuggle other parts of his body as well—feet, belly, neck, butt, ears, hands and more—and I have to wonder if he makes the distinction that Miles suggests he does between his penis and those other parts of his body.
To be fair, though, Miles is talking about a kind of touching that has a lot more in common with adult lovemaking than the play in which my wife and son engage, a "stroking, petting or playing with the child's genitals [that] has the effect of harnessing all his restless energy, focusing it on [his mother or mother figure] and soothing his aggression, irritability or distress." Miles describes this practice under the harem system, when boys sometimes remained in the harem with their mothers until they were as old as twelve, and during the British colonial rule in India, when children were cared for by native female servants known as ayah or amah, and she quotes a Brigadier James Faulder, who recounts how his Nanny Phillips used to "put Peter to bed" that way2 —a practice that, whatever else it may be about, is clearly not an expression of a parent's delight in his or her child's physical existence.
I watch my wife playing with my son, and I envy the uninhibited familiarity they enjoy. For while I kiss and snuggle and fondle him in much the same way she does, I generally avoid his penis. Not that I'm squeamish. When it comes to changing his diaper or washing him in the bath I have no problem handling or otherwise paying attention to his genitals, but the idea of kissing or snuggling or fondling him there inevitably conjures for me the images and feelings of my own sexual abuse, and so the touch itself is for me never innocent no matter how innocently it may be intended or received. This reticence on my part saddens me, for I do not believe that my son does not notice it. Nor do I think that the lesson it teaches him is a good one, though I of course have no way of knowing what that lesson might be. I take comfort, though, that the time will come when my son has the language and the desire to talk about what it is to live in this male flesh we have in common. For in language, at least, I know I can touch him without the corrupting shame of my own abuse, for in language, at least, through language, I have begun to render myself free and unashamed.
Notes:
1Rosalind Miles, Love, Sex, Death, and the Making of the Male (New York: Summit Books, 1991) 38.
2Ibid, 35.
