Intersections of youth and other aspects of the kyriarchy

[sqbr]

naraht's post Adult privilege linking to The Adult Privilege Checklist has a great discussion in the comments poking at the various aspects of adult privilege and possible criticisms of the list. hl's response The Opression of Chilhood. In which I try for emotionless and hard analysis (and fail) got me thinking about intersections.

I don't have any major point, just some thoughts.

So:

• I think a lot of "why don't people pull themselves up by their bootstraps" classism/racism glosses over the fact that children REALLY can't do this. (Not that it's fair to expect it of anyone, but noone's going to deny it's stupid to expect it of say a baby)
  
• Control over sexuality and identity is a MAJOR issue for intersex children, and anyone else with an "abnormal" but functional body who is operated on without their consent "for their own good".
  
• The way children are forced into their parents ethnic/cultural values is a serious issue for interracial/international adoptees.
  

There's more along those lines, but if I wait until I have more to say I'll never get around to posting this :)

EDIT: Adult Privilege Linkspam and A Transformational Politic (bell hooks).

I find myself pondering the similarities and differences with the treatment of disabled people, especially those with cognitive disabilities.

Comments

[elf]

I've been pondering how much USan ageism, of the "legal-infants-until-18th-birthday" variety, ties into racism, especially on an international level. How third-world countries are treated as less-than-human because they "make" children work, or treat them as full members of society, before the legal age of adulthood.

There's an attitude that any culture, or cultural subgroup, that does *not* share white upperclass wealthy [male-dominant] [Christian] attitudes about children, is inferior; that failing to treat children as expensive ornaments that must be strictly controlled is a sign of a primitive and flawed culture.

--------
Control of children's sexuality is taken for granted to a terrifying extent. It's not possible to even have good conversations about the topic, because even admitting that children *have* sexuality is sometimes seen as a sign of perversion. Children's right to be sexual (whether gay, straight, bi, trans, cis, other, etc.) is pretty much nonexistent. And, as you say, that means anyone not leaning in the direction of the most privileged adult category gets an extra helping of "you don't exist and what's important to you is wrong or meaningless or both."

[sqbr]

Hmm, maybe. *ponders*

The arbitrariness of these boundaries certainly becomes clear when you encounter other cultures. For example, in Australia the age of consent is 16 and the drinking age 18, so it's always weird when I see tv characters freaking out about having sex with an OMG 17 year old(*).

I had trouble enough coming to terms with my own socially acceptable heterosexual sexuality as a child/adolescent thanks to the anti-sex environment I grew up in, I can't imagine what it must be like for LGBT children.

(*)Of course Australian child porn laws are their own special brand of bizarre, but I don't think they reflect community norms to the same extent.

[elf]

I've heard that age of consent in Japan is 13, hence the wide availability of manga with very young characters who freak out westerners.

Age of consent in the US varies by state; it ranges from 14 (I think that's currently the lowest; it was previously 12) to 18. But even in the states with under-18 ages-of-consent, the laws get all tweaky-weird around age 18; it may be legal for two 16-year-olds to have sex but not for an 18-year-old to have sex with a 16-year-old.

And the laws are running into some psychotic problems right now, with the internet & cellphones, because *pictures* of under-18s are forbidden... and teens who take pics of their boyfriend/girlfriend and email it to other friends are running afoul of "child pornography" laws.

LGBT teens in the US have an extra layer of discrimination to deal with--until recently, "abstinence-only" sex ed was taught in 49 of the 50 states. (I'm in California, the one original holdout; I think we're down to about half the states still using those programs.) They taught that the only *safe* sex was monogamous inside marriage, and everyone should wait until marriage to have sex. So, um, gay people? Should be celibate for life. (The programs kinda implied that gay people shouldn't or maybe didn't really exist; "confused" teens should hold off on all sexual behavior until they find a straight marriage.)

[sqbr]

teens who take pics of their boyfriend/girlfriend and email it to other friends are running afoul of "child pornography" laws.

Yeah that happens here too.

Abstinence only sex ed is afaict only taught in religious schools here, I remember getting the bare bones of sexuality in primary (elementary) school. And my own nominally religious private girls school had a fairly thorough education on contraception and STDs, though it was still very heteronormative and I think partly motivated by not wanting any teen pregnancies making the school look bad. Oh, and as part of a series of talks by people with interesting and informative life experiences (not for sex ed) we had a gay man with AIDS come talk to us about his life.

Thinking about it, the students were as bad if not worse than the teachers. My fantastically earthy and straightforward sex ed teacher told a girl off when she ranted about how disgusting it was seeing two men kissing and had said girl formally complain that she was "pressuring us to be gay" >:/ (said teacher was happily married to a man and never brought up LGBT issues at any other time) A researcher came to the school and asked if there were any lesbians at the school and someone said "Of course! Well, they deny it, but everyone KNOWS." Meanwhile my bi friend was told she was just trying to sound cool.

Too tired to remember not to typo.

[gretel]

There's a reputation among a lot of single sex private schools in WA in how they teach this differently. I have no idea how true this is now, but I remember my mother (who did her BEd while I was in high school) being disgusted by the differences other teachers were telling her about.

For the girl schools they tend to be rather thorough with making sure the girls know a lot about avoiding pregnancies and STI's for the reason you mentioned.

The boys schools (and this was certainly true of the boys I dated from private schools) they weren't taught shit all. It wasn't something that reflected on the school badly if these boys had poor attitudes towards women and sexual health

Of course, given at least one of these schools has since been busted with 13yearold girls selling porn tapes of themselves to the boys at the private boy schools, hopefully this attitude has been shaken up a bit more (interestingly in that case I remember it was the boys school that caught on and acted fastest about that situation).

Re: Too tired to remember not to typo.

[sqbr]

Heh. That rings a bell, actually, but I've thankfully never dated any private school boys :) Though I asked Cam and he didn't remember having any at his state school.

at least one of these schools has since been busted with 13yearold girls selling porn tapes of themselves

You mean my school? :D That's the PLC entrepreneurial spirit at work! Same as the girls from my year expelled for stealing younger girls laptops and selling them for drug money.

[elf]

Link to "A Transformational Politic" is broken; it starts with href=":http: and the extra colon means it puts a prefix that's the same as the journal it's being read in.

[sqbr]

Oops, thanks.

[hl]

Very interesting and true points!

One caveat. Many people do think/state that children should/could pull themselves up through education, though, as they don't admit that the environment those children grow up in will necessarily qualify that.

As an example, I was never very good at maths--I suspect that the usual 'math is difficult' cultural thing got to me, too--but I was always able to turn to my older siblings for help, so I was one of the best in my class, even if I didn't pay any attention at the time, or almost never studied: when I needed it, they were there to sit with me and explain in different ways until I got it. Not many children have college educated people--three, even!--at their disposal.

And so I was expected to understand by teachers, who never got to see me struggling, and consequently understanding was easier for me. And I was expected to go to college, and hold a better job at the end of it. Nothing of that is pulling myself up through effort alone, but people don't really want to admit it. If kids cannot pass classes with good grades, they're 'just not that smart', and 'they don't have a future'. (I had teacher who used those same words. -_-)

(Your link to A Tranformational Politic is borked.)

[sqbr]

Oh yes. I was thinking more of the "If you can't pay for health care you should just get two jobs" argument, but people do expect kids to transcend their environment in a lot of ways.

I am superficially a great example of self improvement: I went to a terrible primary school but taught myself a lot of stuff off educational tv and books etc, then got a scholarship to a good highschool and then a scholarship to do a Phd, all despite my parents not having much money for most of that period.
But
(a)I'm very academic, and people shouldn't have to be as academic as me to get a halfway decent education (my medium-scholarly siblings didn't get scholarships and ended up dropping out of their local state highschool, though they ended up in tertiary education after a few rough years)
(b)I would have been screwed if Australia didn't have a mostly ok state-funded education system, especially for my undergraduate degree.
(c) My parents are very pro-education, encouraged and helped me learn, and did things like taking me to a lot of scholarship application exams.

[yiduiqie]

I think a lot of "why don't people pull themselves up by their bootstraps" classism/racism glosses over the fact that children REALLY can't do this. (Not that it's fair to expect it of anyone, but noone's going to deny it's stupid to expect it of say a baby)

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, especially in terms to Indigenous Australians. There's a certain infantalising, in a way, of Indigenous Australians, and at the same time there's a culture in mainstream Australia of expecting all Indigenous Australians to now be "okay" - like, no one denies the killing of/dispossession/Stolen Generation, but because it was "in the past" everyone is now expected to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and move on.

[sqbr]

Yes, there's a simultaneous belief that they're inherently inferior and unable to take care of themselves and that any problems they may have are just the result of laziness. (Of course, even the people who acknowledge that current problems are knockon effect of the Stolen generation etc see it as Indigenous Australians being tragically but inherently broken by the actions of Bad White People of the past, not as having anything to do with racist actions being done by white Australians now. But I digress)