Kissing Young King Louis XIII: A Selection from Susan Neiman’s Why Grow Up? (2016)

“Seventeenth-century French children were as familiar with birth and death as they were with sex, and not merely in peasant dwellings where life, of necessity, took place in one room. The royal physician Héroard’s diary contains observations like this one, recorded when the future Louis XIII was one year old: ‘He laughed uproariously when his nanny waggled his cock with her fingers, an amusing trick which the child soon copied. Calling a page he shouted “Hey there!” and pulled up his robe, showing him his cock . . . in high spirits, he made everybody kiss his cock’.

In our current rush to compensate for decades when sexual abuse was ignored, we’d do well to remember that not every form of attention to children’s sexuality is an abuse of it. In early modern France, this sort of behaviour was considered perfectly normal until the age of seven or eight, when children were expected to treat sexual matters with more modesty. It is so far from Victorian expectations of innocence, or our current heightened concern over sexual predators and pederasty, that it can well be asked whether having a child’s body was the same in those three epochs. . . .

Childhood is not fixed, nor the stages of life that follow it. And this truth is not merely a matter of historical or ethnological interest, for if our paths are not determined, then we are free to choose among them. At least in principle. . . .

Philosophy’s greatest task is to enlarge our sense of possibility. When seeking examples to show the possibility of other lives or concepts than the ones we take for granted, many twentieth-century philosophers turned to science fiction. They might have done better to look to history or anthropology. As the examples I’ve just sketched make clear, so much more is possible than the world that we know. That insight is a philosophical one, and like most genuinely philosophical insights its undertone is normative, that is, a claim about how things ought to be. Philosophy can and should draw on the knowledge that can only be gained by looking at the world as it is and as it was, but its sights are always set on the world as it should be.”—Susan Neiman, Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age (2016)