Word: sexualism
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...make their halting way into the world of love. From the moment we're born--when the world is mostly sensation, and nothing much matters beyond a full belly, a warm embrace and a clean diaper--until we finally emerge into adulthood and understand the rich mix of tactile, sexual and emotional experiences that come with loving another adult, we are in a constant state of learning and rehearsing. Along with language, romance may be one of the hardest skills we'll ever be called on to acquire. But while we're more or less fluent in speech...
...same time, kids are learning something about sensual pleasures. They explore their bodies more, discovering that certain areas yield more electrifying feelings than others. This simultaneous emotional development and physical experience can lead to surprising behavior. "Three- and 4-year-olds are very sexual beings," says Gopnik, "and a lot of that is directed at their parents." Some of this can get generalized to other adults too, as when a small child develops a crush on a teacher or seems to flirt with an aunt or uncle. While a number of things are at work when this happens, the most...
...with so much else in childhood, things get more complicated once kids reach the social incubator of elementary school. Nowhere near sexually mature, they nonetheless become sexually active--in their own fashion. The opposite-sex teasing and chasing that are rife on playgrounds may give teachers headaches, but they teach boys and girls a lot. The games, after all, are about pursuit and emotional arousal, two critical elements of sex. "There are a lot of erotic forms of play," says Barrie Thorne, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Gender Play: Boys and Girls...
...surprise, both groups spend a lot of time talking and thinking about the opposite sex, but they do it in very different ways. Boys experiment more with sexually explicit vocabulary and, later, sexual fantasies. Girls focus more heavily--but hardly exclusively--on romantic fantasies. The two-gender world they'll eventually re-enter will be a lot more complex than that, but for now, the boys are simply practicing being boys--albeit in a very rudimentary way--and the girls are practicing being girls. "Among the boys, for example, there's a lot of bragging talk," says Thorne...
...Sexual experimentation is a big part of that--and it's a part that's especially fraught. Pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases are just two of the things that make sex perilous. There are also emotional conflicts kids bring into their early experiences with intimacy. Psychologists have long warned that children who grow up in a hostile home or one in which warmth is withheld are likelier to start having sex earlier and engage in it more frequently. In a study that will be published in March, Trish Williams, a neuropsychology fellow at Alberta Children's Hospital, studied a group...