Subject: Re: Fwd: Tr : URG-SIGN/Appel nous sommes les enfants de la r évolution... (fwd) Date: 11 Mar 2001 02:08:30 +0100 Ruth Chandler <R.Chandler-AT-ucc.ac.uk> writes: > I would really appreciate a translation of this if > anyone has both the time and the generosity Ruth.C But of course. Here you go. Note that this was written a bit hastily. All mistakes are mine, un-PC-ness comes from the original. cheers AN ==================================================== For new signatures or confirmation of signatures ------------------------------------------------ Our text has circulated much. Thanks to all who have passed it along, and to those who have sent us corrections (ah, the professors ...). thanks to all who have sent us little messages of kindness or compassion. Below is the definitive text with the corrections. HOW TO USE * All people that have already signed don't need to confirm. If otoh you want to retract your signature, thanks for letting us know. * Those who want to sign this last version, thanks for sending your signatures, is possible before March 23th, stephane-AT-lavignotte.org * The text will be sent to Lib'e [the journal] today. We hopw for a publication at the end of the week. Signators (generation of children) [...] We Are the Children of the Revolution ==================================== We are the children of the sexual revolution. We have children now, or hope to have them, or are in contact with them, and we want to thank the generation of our parents. We hear the media put Cohn-Bendit on the pillory, accusing him of being a pedophile. We understand what he says, we know what he describes, and many of us have the impression to hear their own parents, and see them, when we listen to him. Are we the children of pedophiles? Many of us had parents who walked naked in front of us, and no doubt they let us touch their breasts, their sexes. They were happy when we fell in love in primary school, when we kissed other children on their mouths. They let us play 'touch-pipi'. What is Cohn-Bendit saying? Did he speak about a desire that he would have felt fo children? Did he have the intention to penetrate them? Did he ask fellatio of them? No. What he is talking about is that our parents let us live--or that we would have wished so--and this is what we want to live with our children. Children that have a sexual life--who would deny that today?--who feel desires, have questions and seductions. In short, not children-objects for the adults, but children-subjects in all their dimensions, including those that excite so much so many minds. The Seventies have made subjects of the children (of us). The sexual revolution--including the realm of infancy--taught us forst of all that our bodies belong to us. That we had the right to do what we want with it, and with who we please. That, because we had become subjects, even, and especially in childhood, we had the right to say no to those who wanted to do something with our bodies and desires other than we desired. To accuse the sexual revolution--which evicted agency for children and made them subjects of their bodies--to be at the origin of pedophilia is as nonsensical as to accuse the revolution (including the sexual one) of the women to be the origin of the rapes they are still suffering today. The sexual revolution taught the children, the adolescents, the women to say no, primarily. We are grateful to the generation of the sexual revolution because they have unlocked the old family where the woman and the children were--and still are, much too often--objects, including being objects of sexual violence of their environment. [...] Since they considered the children that we were to be subjects, including our sexual desires, we can be parents today who can, or will, talk freely to our children. Like our mothers said yesterday in their struggle for abortion and contraception, we tell them, and will tell them, that their bodies belong to them. We hope, and the oldest of them are already doing it, that, in the schoolyard they will explain to their little fellows that you don't get pregnant from a kiss on the mouth, that to find men kissing men (or women kissing women) apalling is not only outdated but as condemnable as racism. They will know what homophobia, cunnilingus, and to be in love mean. We walk naked in front of them, it happens that they touch the sex of their father or mother, that they suck on the breast of their grandmother and ask why they are bigger than those of their mother. If this embarrasses us, we will tell them. If, one day, we discover that our nudity embarasses them, we will discuss it. The respect of feelings and of intimity is before all reciprocal. This is what the generation of our parents has taught us in the first place: that nothing is taboo--especially not a libido constitutive of a being that would be dangerous to deny--and that everything is subject to discussion, that everything has its price [all that merits costs]. Scandalous words and writings, those of Cohn-Bendit? No, but those of a necessary explosion of the word which allowed to say 'I' and to say 'no'. This is the very contrary of pedophilia and the law of silence. If today speech is freeing itself, speech about the horrors suffered, about abusing priests, about parents that rape, about families that cover up, is this speech not due to that first deflagration? We are concerned about this society of paranoia which denounces so quickly the sect, the pedophile, but which never gives itself the means--in speech, in staff, in structures, in deep change--that would allow for a real fight against this violence and its origin. A society that finds its scapegoats to avoid to give itself the means to act. We thank our parents because they have given us the appetite to change the world. We thank them for having unleashed this sexual revolution and we think that if we want that one day women and children shall not be raped any more, that everyone is the master of his body, the sexual revolution must recommence, since it has made the mistake to stop. Stephane Lavignotte
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