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