Try offering a child anything that appeals to the senses: music will make her dance; anything that tastes good/gooey/chocolatey/fried will create simple uncomplicated joy; hug and cuddle a child, and you will be loved and accepted. An adult trying to do any of this will have to deschool herself so thoroughly from the strictures that growing up places on instinct.

I think that it is this trusting, open, reaching out and embracing of instinct are the engines of sexuality.

Why would it be surprising then that children have a sexual self? Perhaps not as a genitalic act between two people. Instead, a sensuality that makes language and labels fraudulent. A sensuality that relies on the simplicity of touch.

Children discover that they can feel pleasure early on. Masturbation in boys and girls is known, often discovered through swinging on the gate, or on a rhythmic rocking horse, or by exploring one’s own body. I think that if we searched through our histories with honesty we will find our own stories of sensual self discovery.

I once read a story about a girl called Alice and her pet dog. Alice discovered that when her puppy sat on her lap in a certain way she felt something that made her feel incredibly happy. The story was up for discussion in the office I worked in. It generated much more discussion and hysteria than all the contentious articles on pornography or rape did (and what was an office doing reading about sex all day long? Ah, that is another story) with notions of bestiality and perversion being the central issues of debate.

Was Alice’s story about sex or sensuality or perversion? It doesn’t matter because Alice was probably in a place where experiencing was all that mattered. I think it’s the reader who imbues her experience with individual meanings and notions.

The story of Alice struck fear at the heart of sacred beliefs that some of us adults had. That sexual pleasure is a dangerous thing that only adults have the maturity to handle. That children are asexual. Some mothers in our group who for the first time entertained the idea of childhood sexuality were worried that their girls would grow up to be “fast”.

An older friend who has a seven year old daughter was telling me about how her daughter likes to kiss her on the lips sometimes. My friend was a little taken aback at first and unsure of whether to encourage it or not. Later thinking about it she decided that she wasn’t going to say anything or wonder where her daughter picked it up from. Why should kissing on the lips be restricted to adult intimacy when the relationship between a parent and child is perhaps the longest and most visceral intimacy we will ever know? When my friend asked her daughter why she wanted to kiss her on the lips, the answer was simple: because I love you.

Unfortunately a child’s journey of sensuality could be interrupted by invasion and abuse. Not being conditioned to have a sense of personal space and power, coupled with openness and trust, allows adults to impose their own sexuality on that of a child. And this can span everything from rape and sodomy to exposure, fondling and touching. And this is when things begin to complicate a child’s relationship with his experience of pleasure. Because it is now being driven by the sexuality of an adult, which is often a wholly different emotional tableau, a result of his/her own conditioning.

Children often can and do experience sexual/sensual pleasure in a situation that can be emotionally or physically abusive. Sexual pleasure is as much a physiological reaction as it is psychological. Imagine the confusion when physical pleasure, sometimes even love for the adult, and psychological stress intersect. Signals and connections in the heart and the head can get confused. Love = Pleasure = Pain?

And then children can enter this space again, sometimes because it is pleasurable, or because of the psychological manipulation by the adult, or because of the interaction of both. Sometimes, in an act of psychological self-preservation, a child may tell himself that this is what he really wants. The imprints of guilt, shame, and self-loathing can be felt way ahead into adulthood. (But often, adults who choose to forget their histories respond to all this ‘psychobabble’ with derision.)

Through the experience of abuse a child’s sexual self loses its unique uncomplicated experiencing. Instinct takes on a new set of parameters, new coordinates begin to define love, trust, and intimacy, none of which the child has any agency in defining. New scripts play out in old theatres of pleasure.

Perhaps even a child who has not been abused is not immune to the pressures and pulls of time and society. How many people in a child’s environment actually encourage the experience of love for her own body? Maybe Alice’s mother discovered her pleasure-seeking and shamed her into stopping. Maybe Alice grew up and found out that there was nothing sexy or pleasurable about the color of her skin or the size of her legs.

Is it all lost then, is childhood sensuality going to remain a warm fuzzy memory? Would it be somehow perverse to be as carefree as a child in the body of an adult? Ask the adult who feels weighed down by tradition, culture, and morality.

I don’t know.

Maybe its possible that if you try, if you want to de-school yourself from the lessons of shame and guilt, it may just be possible to re-capture a glimmer of that child’s unfettered sensual joy.