The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution

by Carl R. Trueman

If the issue is consent, then the first obvious objection is that children are often made to do things to which they do not consent, from receiving immunizations and eating their vegetables to attending kindergarten and having to go to bed at a certain time. Why should sex be privileged as requiring consent? Further, how does Reich know that his own objection to pedophilia is not simply a holdover from the sexual mores of the capitalist society he so despises, with its need to keep children carefully corralled within the oppressive structure of the traditional family? Could Reich’s own objection here not be based simply on his own false sexual consciousness, a vestige of bourgeois morality determined by the times in which he lives? Conveniently, Reich does not care to parse the issue at all but simply roots his objection in the age difference of the participants and their status relative to the process of puberty.