214
STEVEN MARCUS
and universally acknowledged among the urban poor.
1
It is obviously
directed at an audience composed of the urban middle classes, for
only among those classes could 'there be found that combination of
circumstances-living conditions, ideology, estrangement from tradi–
tional knowledge-which made possible a belief in the asexuality of
childhood. (And as we shall see even this is untrue.) But it is also
an audience which has a need to read about sex, which is troubled by
sexual ignorance and fear, and which has a consciousness of sexuality
as a problem.
This is confirmed by what follows, for having spent a page and a
half describing the "normal" asexual functions of childhood, he de–
votes the next twenty-odd pages to a discussion of sexual "disorders"
in childhood, and communicates unmistakably the sense that child–
hood sexual play and childhood masturbation were both widespread
and well-known phenomena. To be sure, he disapproves of these
practices, but he does not deny their existence or prevalence. We are
faced then with a double or contradictory conscioUsness. On the one
hand children are spoken of as pure and innocent and sexually
quiescent ; on the other, they are described as constandy threatened
by horrid temptations, open to stimulation and corruption, and in
danger of becoming litde monsters of appetite. There is nothing to
mediate between these two ,extreme states, no middle ground or
connection between them. And the contradiction that children are
both at once remains altogether unconscious.
The causes of this sexual "precocity" are legion. They include
hereditary predisposition, "irritation of the rectum arising from
worms," bed-wetting, irritation of the "glans penis arising from the
collection of secretion under the prepuce," and, in boys who do
suffer from such irritation, manipulation of the penis while washing
it in order to reduce the original stimulus- these youngsters seem to
have had it. Although Acton is not an advocate of circumcision, he
finds the foreskin a dangerous nuisance for both sanitary and moral
reasons. "It affords an additional surface for the excitement of the
reflex action, and aggravates an instinct rather than supplies a want,"
he writes in a footnote. " In the unmarried it additionally excites the
sexual desires, which it is our object to repress"-he is nothing
if
not
1.
In his book on prostitution, Acton himself points this out.
