In India, children are "children" depending on socioeconomic class. Poor people have no childhood and rich people's childhoods appear to last forever.
I would believe poor children over the age of about 5 could be treated as little different than adults. But even though the rich (in India or someplace else) may not really 'mature' in the sense that we'd like them to, they do still go through a changed set of expectations. Including sexual ones and others.
In Saudi Arabia, while puberty does bring on differences in social behaviour [veil in girls, for example], children are much more precocious and adult like than in India or the west. Even 5 year olds will flash you.
And the veil is a very good example of changed expectations because of adulthood as distinct from childhood.
In the US, it seems quite strange but while even 5 year olds will wear low cut jeans and sexy clothes, courtesy of their parents, you can talk to 20 year olds and realise how immature they are.
There are immature people every, sam, and I refuse to believe that you don't understand that. I find the Chinese generally more immature at a given age than the Canadians. Part of this, when I first came here, was admittedly racism and ignorance. I initially failed to recognize even one aspect in which the people showed a different kind of maturity than Canadians, simply trying to match my old conception of the word with Chinese behaviour. As time goes on you realize you can't judge everyone by the same ruler - as nice and easy at it sounds. The same way I don't judge George Washington too harshly for owning slaves. It was a different time and place and you can't hold the same expectations. And like this, we can try to carry our expectations from one homeland to the next, but it is not intellectually fruitful.
I know about rights of passage, they generally herald puberty and ascent into manhood or womanhood, but the treatment of children before that, is vastly different in Eastern cultures. At least, as far as I have seen.
I agree. But what you originally said was that "childhood" is a Western idea. It's not. It's a universal idea. For that matter, a culture would have to be startlingly stupid to not have a conception of "childhood". Even if, as I said, poor Indians may start adulthood (or something similar to it) at such a low age as five or six, there is still obviously a period before hand, where the child cannot have sex (physically incapable) in any sense and most likely cannot really work. It just may be a shorter concept of childhood.
And in that case you can make the point that the world never had a 0 - 18 years old (or 16, or whatever you think we in the west pin it at) childhood. But I would just counter that this is a natural and, indeed, beneficial understanding in many respects. As the Jews made concrete so many years ago, a child cannot properly start understanding certain concepts until around thirteen*. Nowadays, there is much more to learn before work, and so the choosing stage of life (or settling stage) is pushed much later.
My point is that even if the Moslem world or Chinese had risen first in technology, social rights and political evolution to the point we've seen in the last 200 years, childhood would most likely have been extended so long anyway. Don't blame it on the west; blame it on modernization.
Btw, kudos on your post. All this is considered natural behaviour where I come from.
Thanks. I'm not so sure I think it's
healthy behaviour. Humans have been known to do quite a far natural things that are not healthy. Sex with prepubescents may very well be one of them.
And as for sex between adults and those of 13, 14, 15 years age... Again, I see this as potentially being unhealthy simply because of the elongated period of childhood. No doubt a long childhood period changes psychological development, possibly to the point that with a short childhood, have sex at 13 may have no common ill effect, and yet with a long childhood, sex at 13 may be quite damaging. I think this may be a very promising point of research and wouldn't be surprised if there's a very direct link. In which case, again, blame it on modernization.
Sam, I think you may be guilty of one of my own faults living in China. I understand you think of yourself as open-minded, fair and just. I think of myself the same way. But once we become convinced of something - i.e. that the Chinese are socially less developed, or, that the West has destroyed natural systems and erected artificial ones - it becomes hard to view questions from another angle. I can take anything that annoys me in a given day and link it to my convictions on the Chinese. I'm sure you can do the same with what happens to you in America.
We have to remember that sometimes it's not the base answer. Sometimes there are other ways to approach the question and find a new, more thorough answer.
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That said, I also think the West is highly repressed sexually and fully agree that a lot of the barriers put up are artificial. But only insofar as that cases should ideally be taken one by one, rather than lumped all into one massive pile. Frankly, I can't believe there aren't more people that realize that gays are massively repressed in America in a completely immoral way.
Thats not a paradox at all. Discipline is usually emphasised where freedom is given.
Good point. Though in China it also has to do with the fact that parents and children not discussing sex as much means that people go into the bedroom with no inhibitions. When you've never heard someone else say "ewwww, only dirty girls have anal sex", nothing makes you think anal sex is that dirty. When no one tells you that a guy coming on your face is degrading, you don't really see it as so degrading.
N.B. Since being in China this has caused me to find feminists like Dworkin absolutely hilarious. I don't think she ever realized that her taking about sex as a domination/servant relationship actually made it more like that!
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*I know Moslems start learning the Quran by writ earlier in life, but I believe most clerics do not expect the child to understand the same meaning as an adult will - at least not most children. Either way, the child that can comprehend quantum mechanics at 12 is rare. In that sense, there will always be a divide between childhood understanding and adult in the general sense, and the Jews were one of the first people to place a very firm understanding between the type of information that can be understood in youth and that saved for later. Say what you will about the quality of the law (it's largely junk, frankly), but the Talmud is an advanced peace of legal framework and one of the earliest such examples.
