The age of innocence

Eve took a fruit, Eve bit the fruit
Juice ran down her chin
Babies will put things in their mouths
Never heard of sin.
–Joan Osborne/Lumina

I don’t really know how I would define innocence exactly, but I’m not sure I ever was innocent. Even when I was little, I felt like I was sort of in the wrong body. I felt like I should have been born “grown up” (whatever that is)

[It really fucks up a person’s punctuation if they use quotes and quotation marks in the same sentence. Certainly I am innocent of any knowledge of the rules of punctuation.]

{Yes, I’m doing this just to be punctuationally annoying. No, punctuationally isn’t a real word. Yes, I’m just about done with this schtick.}

In any case, I was definitely always sexually aware. I didn’t know what anything was called, or what its ultimate purpose was, but like most of us I knew what felt good well before I knew where and when it was appropriate to do those particular things. I apologize to anyone who might remember me from nursery school and suffered any traumatic events related to that.

Ahem.

I could say I was innocent of the connection between those feelings and other people…but that wouldn’t be true. It seems like I always knew that it could, maybe should be reciprocal. I knew I definitely didn’t want people I didn’t like to touch me.

I certainly didn’t know that that particular good feeling had anything to do with producing babies until I was much older. I don’t remember when I figured all that out. By the time they got around to telling us about it in school it didn’t come as a surprise.

What I was innocent of was just exactly how complicated sexuality and sexual feelings could make a life. And my life is sexually pretty uncomplicated compared to some people I’ve known. It would certainly be simpler if we could just indulge ourselves whenever we wanted with whoever catches our attention, but for most of us that isn’t how we organize our sexual lives.

Don’t worry, I won’t talk about the science behind that.
I probably could, but I don’t think it’s all that relevant, except that it might be worth thinking about if it explains why we still tend to pair up when we’re also built to have a wandering eye and libidos that go into overdrive when we meet new people who are sexually interesting to us.

And I’ve never figured out what role jealousy plays, but it seems to be something innate.

Or maybe we shouldn’t talk about sexual roles. It makes people uncomfortable. Not as uncomfortable as talking about masturbating in nursery school, that’s true. Who is wondering exactly what I am not willing to talk about at this point?

Me, too.

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