The Women We Have Made into Wounds

A culture can injure women for generations and then ask their daughters to understand the consequences as a family problem. There is a remarkable act of disappearance in this arrangement. The mother becomes the source of the shame, the grandmother the origin of the silence, the maternal line a succession of women whose fears, prohibitions and unfinished suffering must now be examined and overcome. We speak of inherited wounds, ancestral patterns and the burdens passed between generations, frequently with genuine compassion and a sincere desire to understand ourselves. Yet I am troubled by the ease with which the women themselves can vanish beneath the language through which we describe their influence. Their lives become explanations for our difficulties, their silences become evidence of their limitations, and the world that shaped them recedes into the background.

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We should be deeply concerned by any account of intergenerational harm that leaves the women who endured it carrying the greater part of its responsibility. A mother who taught her daughter to fear male attention may have been attempting to protect her from consequences she understood all too well. A grandmother who regarded sexual pleasure with suspicion may have lived within a marriage where the possibility of refusing intimacy carried dangers she had little freedom to escape. A woman whose tenderness appeared constrained may have learned to preserve herself through emotional restraint in circumstances where vulnerability came at considerable cost. Their responses may have shaped their children in painful ways. Their choices may have caused harm. But the conditions through which those responses acquired meaning belong to a history larger than the women who carried them.

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And when we reduce that history to the shortcomings of individual mothers, we risk asking women to take responsibility once again for a world whose arrangements they had little authority to determine.

The contemporary language of healing can become strangely dependent upon the figure of the wounded mother. We are encouraged to examine what she failed to give, the fears she communicated, the desires she suppressed, the ways her relationship with herself influenced our own. Such examination may illuminate experiences whose meanings have remained obscure for much of our lives. Yet it can also establish a narrative in which the mother becomes significant primarily through what she was unable to provide. Her humanity is gradually organised around the consequences of her suffering, and the daughter who seeks freedom is invited to understand that suffering chiefly through the obstacles it has created within herself. What happens to a woman's life when its meaning becomes the wound another generation must heal?

 

I think we owe these women a more demanding form of attention. We owe them the recognition that they existed before they became our mothers, before their bodies were claimed by marriage or motherhood, before their identities became inseparable from the people whose lives depended upon them. They were girls who encountered beauty and desire, who imagined futures, who experienced longing, envy, delight, curiosity and the extraordinary uncertainties of becoming women. They possessed private worlds that existed beyond the roles through which their families and communities came to know them. They may have wanted things they never spoke of, or spoken of desires that were dismissed as impractical, selfish or impossible. Their lives contained choices made freely and choices shaped by circumstances that constrained the meanings of freedom itself.

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A woman may have spent decades raising children, preserving a marriage, managing a household and fulfilling responsibilities whose successful performance became the measure of her worth. The culture might have called her devoted. Her family might have regarded her sacrifices as expressions of love. She may herself have taken genuine pride and pleasure in what she created. Yet somewhere within that life existed a person whose desires exceeded the functions she performed for others. The fact that those desires remained unspoken tells us little about their absence. Silence can conceal a world of feeling whose depth becomes visible only when someone has the courage to ask what it cost to remain silent.

 

How rarely have we asked? We have been remarkably willing to honour women's sacrifices while remaining reluctant to examine the conditions that made those sacrifices necessary. The devoted wife, the selfless mother, the grandmother who endured hardship with dignity: these figures occupy a cherished place within our collective imagination. Their capacity to give is celebrated, their resilience admired, their willingness to carry the burdens of family life presented as evidence of extraordinary feminine strength. Yet such admiration can become another means through which the magnitude of what was demanded of them is concealed. We praise the woman who survived while leaving the circumstances that required her survival beyond examination.

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There is a profound difference between recognising a woman's strength and making her endurance into an ideal. For when endurance is celebrated as one of the highest expressions of feminine virtue, the deprivation through which it became necessary can acquire the appearance of moral purpose. The woman who remained in a marriage that offered little tenderness may be remembered for her loyalty. The woman who surrendered opportunities for independence may be praised for her devotion. The woman who silenced her anger may be celebrated for her patience. Such descriptions can contain genuine affection while obscuring the possibility that these women were required to cultivate virtues whose necessity arose from the unequal arrangements of their lives.

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We should consider what might be revealed if we examined these histories through the question of pleasure. What did the woman whose life was devoted to the care of others experience as nourishment for herself? Where did she encounter beauty? What awakened longing within her? What pleasures did she allow herself to pursue, and which did she learn to regard as belonging to a life beyond her reach? How much of her intimate experience was shaped by desire, and how much by the conviction that another person's satisfaction was among the responsibilities she had undertaken?

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These are questions that disturb the sentimental narratives through which generations of women have been remembered. They require us to recognise that the woman we called mother possessed a sexual and sensual existence whose meanings extended beyond her relationship to our father. That the grandmother whose life appeared entirely devoted to family may have carried an erotic imagination that found little expression within the circumstances available to her. That the women who taught us modesty, restraint or self-sacrifice may themselves have known desires that threatened the identities through which they had secured acceptance.

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To recognise this is to encounter the disturbing possibility that the women whose lives made our own possible were frequently granted so little space in which to become fully known.Yet we must resist the temptation to imagine these earlier generations as women whose erotic lives consisted entirely of suppression. Such an account would repeat, through a different language, the denial of their complexity. Women have always found ways to experience pleasure, to pursue desire, to challenge expectations and to create spaces of freedom within circumstances intended to constrain them. They have loved passionately, conducted affairs, cultivated friendships of extraordinary intimacy, danced, laughed, created, resisted and discovered forms of sensual delight whose meanings belonged entirely to them. Some found profound erotic fulfilment within marriage. Others discovered pleasure through relationships that challenged the moral expectations of their time. Many experienced lives in which freedom and constraint existed together, neither wholly liberated nor entirely deprived.

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Their pleasure deserves recognition as surely as their suffering. This matters because the contemporary conversation about erotic reclamation can sometimes construct the women of previous generations as though they were strangers to eros, waiting for their descendants to discover what had been denied to them. We speak of awakening the feminine, recovering ancestral wisdom and healing the sexual wounds of our lineage, while imagining a past inhabited primarily by women whose relationship with desire was broken, silenced or incomplete. Yet the women who came before us possessed their own forms of erotic knowledge. They recognised beauty, sought tenderness, experienced longing and found pleasure within the possibilities available to them. Their understanding of eros may have differed from ours, shaped by circumstances we can scarcely imagine. But their experience belongs to them, and our freedom grants us no authority to define the fullness or inadequacy of their lives.

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There is an uncomfortable arrogance in assuming that a generation possessing greater sexual permission necessarily possesses a deeper understanding of erotic life. Our mothers may have known forms of intimacy whose subtlety has become difficult to recognise within a culture devoted to the display of sexual confidence. Our grandmothers may have understood the erotic through pleasures that occupied little place in public discussions of sexuality: the enjoyment of solitude, the intimacy of friendship, the sensual attention given to a garden, the pleasure of music, the excitement of intellectual discovery, the private delight of a beauty encountered beyond the demands of usefulness. These experiences could exist alongside sexual deprivation, disappointment or coercion. They remind us that the human capacity for eros has always exceeded the boundaries through which sexuality has been regulated.

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But the recognition of such pleasures must never become another means of disguising what was lost. For there are losses whose consequences extend beyond the possibility of personal healing. A woman who spent much of her adult life within a marriage marked by sexual obligation may eventually discover a relationship with desire that earlier circumstances made difficult to imagine. She may experience profound joy in that discovery. Yet the years through which she learned to disregard her own pleasure remain part of the history of her life. The possibilities that existed at twenty, at thirty, at forty, unfolded under conditions that can never be entirely recreated. The woman she might have become within a world that honoured her sexual autonomy belongs to a future she was never permitted to inhabit.

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And this is where the language of reclamation encounters one of its most difficult truths.Time cannot be returned. We may challenge the beliefs through which earlier generations lived. We may create relationships that offer freedoms our mothers struggled to imagine. We may discover pleasure, autonomy and forms of intimacy that transform our understanding of what it means to inhabit a human body. These achievements matter profoundly. Yet they exist alongside the recognition that generations of women devoted portions of their lives to arrangements whose consequences cannot be undone by the freedoms subsequently won.

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The woman who endured unwanted sexual intimacy for decades has lived those decades. The woman whose desire was repeatedly subordinated to the expectations of others has experienced a life shaped by that subordination. The woman who abandoned creative ambitions because her responsibilities left little room for their pursuit has known the passage of years in which those ambitions remained unrealised. Their lives contain meanings and possibilities that deserve recognition beyond the stories of liberation through which later generations may attempt to make sense of them. And I believe there is a grief here that contemporary pleasure culture has scarcely begun to acknowledge.

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It is the grief of recognising that freedom arrived too late for some of the people whose lives made its arrival possible. The grief of understanding that the women who raised us may have endured experiences we now possess the language to name as harmful, while they themselves were granted little recognition of their right to question them. The grief of discovering that what was once presented as the natural condition of womanhood involved losses whose magnitude becomes increasingly apparent as our own freedoms expand.

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This grief asks something different of us from the desire for healing. It asks us to witness what has occurred, to recognise the lives through which cultural arrangements acquired their human consequences, and to resist the temptation to transform every injury into a story whose meaning depends upon eventual redemption. The language of transformation is seductive because it offers the possibility that suffering can be converted into wisdom, that deprivation can become the foundation of strength, that the wounds of previous generations can acquire purpose through the liberation of those who follow. There may be profound truth within particular experiences of this kind. People do discover meaning through difficulty. They create lives of extraordinary beauty from circumstances that once seemed to offer little possibility. Yet the existence of such meaning belongs to the person who discovers it. It cannot be imposed retrospectively upon the suffering of others.

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A woman's deprivation does not become acceptable because her daughter has learned something from it. Her suffering requires no justification through the freedoms subsequently achieved by another generation. Her life possesses its own significance, independent of the lessons we may draw from its history. And I want us to be careful here, because the desire to honour our ancestors can become another way of making their lives serve our purposes. We speak of the women who came before us as though their suffering prepared the ground for our awakening. We describe ourselves as the generation that will finally break the patterns, reclaim the pleasure, restore the feminine and bring healing to the lineage. Such language can emerge from genuine love and a profound recognition of the histories we have inherited. Yet it can also transform the lives of earlier women into stages within a story whose culmination is ourselves. We become the liberated daughters of wounded mothers. Their lives become the darkness against which our freedom is illuminated. But these women were the centres of their own lives.

 

Their desires, disappointments, pleasures and acts of resistance possessed meaning before we arrived to interpret them. They existed within histories that began long before our own struggles and contained possibilities whose significance may remain beyond our understanding. The freedom we now pursue should enlarge our capacity to recognise their humanity, rather than granting us another language through which to reduce them to the circumstances of their suffering. This recognition also requires us to confront the complexity of harm within families. A mother may have been shaped by oppressive conditions and still have exercised power in ways that injured her children. She may have passed on sexual shame through judgement, enforced expectations that diminished her daughter's autonomy, or participated in silences through which abuse remained concealed. The suffering she endured offers important context for understanding her choices. It leaves the consequences of those choices equally deserving of recognition.

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We can acknowledge the historical conditions that shaped a woman's life while holding her responsible for the harm she caused. We can recognise her limitations without requiring her daughter to deny what those limitations cost. We can understand the fears through which she attempted to protect herself while recognising that those fears may have become instruments of control within the next generation. Such understanding asks for a moral maturity greater than the simple division of women into those who were wounded and those who have become free.

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It asks us to recognise that people can be injured by power and participate in its exercise. That a woman may resist certain expectations while enforcing others. That love can coexist with harm, and that understanding the conditions through which harm emerged does little to erase the experience of the person who received it. The daughter who begins to question her mother's understanding of sexuality may discover anger alongside compassion. She may recognise the injustices that shaped her mother's life while grieving the absence of tenderness or freedom within her own. She may choose to challenge the expectations her mother passed to her, even when those expectations were offered with the intention of protection. Her freedom includes the authority to determine what she wishes to carry forward and what she is prepared to bring to an end. And the mother, too, deserves the possibility of transformation beyond the expectations imposed upon her by the next generation.

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We should be interested in the woman who encounters new understandings of eros later in life. The woman whose children have grown, whose marriage has changed or ended, whose body has moved through experiences that alter her relationship with desire. She may discover possibilities that unsettle the understandings through which she has lived for decades. She may question beliefs she once taught with certainty. She may begin to recognise pleasures that were previously obscured by obligation, or develop the courage to refuse arrangements she had long accepted as inevitable. Her freedom is worthy of recognition in its own right.

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The contemporary celebration of erotic awakening often speaks to women as though reclamation belongs to an imagined period of youth, vitality or sexual possibility. Yet the woman who discovers the authority of her desire at seventy has encountered something whose value can scarcely be measured through the years remaining to her. Her experience may possess a depth of knowledge that could only have emerged through the life she has known. She may approach pleasure with an understanding of its fragility, beauty and significance that challenges the culture's fascination with sexual achievement. The meanings of eros may continue to unfold through every stage of a human life, and the dignity of that unfolding deserves recognition beyond the ideals through which sexual vitality is conventionally celebrated. But the possibility of later freedom should deepen our concern for those whose circumstances offered little opportunity to encounter it.

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We should remember the women whose lives ended before the laws that governed their bodies were changed. The women who remained within marriages because the alternatives carried impossible consequences. The women whose sexuality was condemned, whose desires were punished, whose reproductive choices were controlled, whose bodies were treated as available for exploitation. We should remember the women whose experiences of sexual harm were never spoken of, and those whose attempts to speak were met with disbelief or silence. They belong to the history of erotic liberation because their lives reveal what was at stake in the struggles through which freedom became possible. And they deserve something more substantial than our admiration for their resilience. They deserve the willingness to confront the arrangements through which their suffering was permitted, the institutions that protected those arrangements, and the cultural ideals through which their deprivation was made to appear natural. They deserve an understanding of history that recognises how power operates through the ordinary expectations of intimate life, and how easily the language of love, respectability and duty can conceal demands that diminish the people expected to fulfil them. Above all, they deserve a conversation about pleasure that possesses sufficient moral courage to recognise the gravity of what was taken from them.

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For the history of eros is also a history of possibilities foreclosed. The tenderness that might have been experienced within a relationship organised around mutual recognition. The sexual pleasure that might have unfolded in a body free from the expectation of compliance. The creative life that might have emerged had a woman's time and energy been regarded as belonging to her. The intimacy that might have become possible had fear, shame or economic dependence ceased to govern the conditions of love. We can never know the full extent of these possibilities. Their absence remains largely beyond the reach of historical record, concealed within lives whose private desires may have received little recognition even from those closest to them. Yet the impossibility of recovering their particular meanings should deepen our attention to the conditions through which they were denied.

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There is a danger in speaking of historical harm entirely through the language of what it has taught us. Such language can encourage us to search for the personal meaning of suffering while overlooking the moral significance of its existence. Some experiences deserve to be recognised as losses. Some injustices require confrontation because of what occurred, regardless of what may subsequently emerge from them.

I want us to make room for that recognition within our understanding of eros. To permit grief its place alongside celebration, anger alongside tenderness, the acknowledgement of deprivation alongside the discovery of pleasure. These experiences belong within the fullness of our humanity. They can deepen our relationship with the histories through which we have come to understand ourselves, allowing us to recognise the circumstances of our own freedom with greater seriousness.

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And they may alter the meaning of what we owe to the generations that follow, for if we recognise the lives diminished through the expectation of sexual compliance, we acquire a responsibility to question the arrangements through which compliance continues to be demanded. If we recognise the shame through which women's desires were regulated, we acquire a responsibility to examine how shame operates within the lives of girls growing up today. If we understand the consequences of treating feminine self-sacrifice as a virtue, we must become willing to challenge the conditions through which women are still expected to devote their lives to the needs of others.

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Our inheritance acquires its moral significance through what we are prepared to do with the knowledge it offers. The history of our mothers and grandmothers should inspire something more demanding than the private pursuit of healing. It should disturb our acceptance of arrangements that continue to require people to subordinate their desires to the expectations of others. It should challenge the ease with which women's labour, tenderness, availability and capacity for endurance are celebrated while the conditions governing their freedom remain inadequately examined. And it should make us suspicious of any contemporary movement that presents erotic reclamation primarily as the work of overcoming our personal inheritances while leaving the world that produced those inheritances largely intact.

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A woman may spend years attempting to heal the sexual shame passed down through her family while continuing to live within a culture that judges women according to their desirability. She may cultivate the confidence to express her needs while entering relationships organised around the expectation that those needs will remain secondary. She may recognise the limitations of her mother's understanding of femininity while encountering new ideals of sensuality and empowerment that demand another form of conformity. The consequences of collective history become personal, while the cultural arrangements through which they are reproduced continue to escape sufficient attention.

 

The lives of earlier generations invite us to examine what we are prepared to accept in our own. Their experiences challenge us to recognise the forms of accommodation we continue to praise as love, the sacrifices we still demand in the name of family, and the expectations through which the authority of women's desire remains conditional. Their histories ask us to consider how the world might be organised differently if the freedom to experience pleasure, refuse intimacy, pursue creative life and determine the meaning of one's own existence were recognised as essential dimensions of human dignity. The women who came before us deserve to be remembered as human beings whose lives possessed meanings far greater than the wounds we have inherited from them. They deserve to be encountered in their complexity, their pleasures and contradictions, their acts of courage, their compromises and their desires. They deserve the recognition that their lives were shaped through circumstances whose consequences extended into the most intimate territories of their humanity.

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And their daughters deserve the freedom to question those circumstances while remaining free to love, grieve, challenge or forgive the women through whom they first encountered them. The reclamation of eros acquires a different significance when we recognise the fullness of this inheritance. It becomes an encounter with the people whose lives preceded our own, with the freedoms they struggled to secure, and with the losses that remain beyond the reach of restoration. It calls us towards a deeper understanding of the conditions through which human beings have been permitted to experience themselves, and towards a willingness to challenge the arrangements that continue to diminish those possibilities.

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I want us to remember that our mothers were women before they became our mothers. That their bodies carried desires whose meanings belonged to them, that their lives contained pleasures and sorrows we may never fully understand, and that their humanity extended beyond the roles through which we came to know them. I want us to remember the women whose erotic lives were shaped by duty, whose longings were silenced through shame, whose freedom was constrained by the conditions of their time. And I want us to remember those who resisted, who found pleasure in forbidden places, who created intimacy beyond the boundaries established for them, and who insisted upon the authority of their own experience long before the culture was prepared to recognise it. Their histories belong within our celebration of eros because the freedoms available to us have emerged through the world they inhabited, the injustices they endured and the struggles through which they challenged what had been presented as inevitable.

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We may find extraordinary joy in reclaiming pleasures that earlier generations struggled to experience freely. We may create relationships that offer forms of intimacy our mothers could scarcely have imagined. We may recognise the authority of our own desire and discover possibilities that transform our understanding of what it means to be alive. But the freedom to live differently carries with it the responsibility to remember what made that difference necessary. If we are to honour the generations who came before us, let us begin by granting them what so many were denied in life: the recognition that they were human beings whose desires, pleasures and possibilities possessed significance entirely their own. Their lives deserve to be understood in the fullness of what they were, as well as in the shadow of what they might have become. The history of eros belongs as much to the women whose pleasures were constrained as to those who now celebrate their reclamation.

 

And the freedom we inherit demands that we finally learn to see them.

 

 

What We Teach the Children

We should be very careful what we call love in the presence of children. For it is through love that some of our most enduring lessons about power are first delivered. A child learns to recognise the world through the people upon whom their existence depends, people whose affection becomes inseparable from their earliest understanding of safety, belonging and personal worth. Their gestures become instructions. Their silences establish boundaries around what may be spoken. Their fears acquire the authority of wisdom, and their expectations become part of the language through which a child begins to know themselves. Long before we teach children the meaning of sexuality, we have begun teaching them what their bodies are for, whose feelings they must protect, what love demands of them and what may happen when they refuse.

And I believe we have greatly underestimated the significance of this education.

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We speak of the importance of preparing children for the world, yet so much of that preparation involves teaching them to accommodate conditions we ourselves have failed to change. We teach girls to anticipate danger rather than demanding a world in which their bodies are respected. We teach boys to conceal vulnerability rather than challenging the understanding of masculinity that has made vulnerability a source of humiliation. We tell children to be confident while surrounding them with judgements about their appearance, their behaviour and their willingness to satisfy the expectations of others. We celebrate their individuality until that individuality threatens the arrangements through which we have learned to organise our own lives. Then, years later, we wonder why so many adults struggle to recognise their own desires.

 

Consider how early a girl may learn that the preservation of another person's feelings requires the abandonment of her own. She is encouraged to be agreeable, to smile when addressed, to offer affection when requested, to remain pleasant in the presence of attention she finds uncomfortable. The adult who demands a kiss or an embrace may be someone who loves her deeply. The expectation may arise through a familiar ritual of affection, carried between generations with little thought given to its meaning. Yet the moment becomes worthy of examination when the child's reluctance is treated as a difficulty to be overcome, when the disappointment of the adult takes precedence over the preference of the child, and when the preservation of social harmony becomes more important than her authority over her own body. The issue extends far beyond the particular gesture. It concerns the relationship being established between bodily autonomy and the emotional demands of others.

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What does a child learn when affection becomes something they must provide to protect another person's feelings? What meaning does refusal acquire when the expression of it is met with disappointment, persuasion or shame? A child may come to understand that the boundaries of the body are legitimate only when they create little inconvenience for someone else. And within that understanding lies a lesson that women have been expected to carry for generations: that the needs of others confer obligations upon us, and that love may require us to surrender our own preferences in order to preserve it.

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We have become so accustomed to praising feminine accommodation that we can overlook the conditions through which it is cultivated. A girl is admired for her sweetness, her sensitivity, her ability to recognise what others need. She may receive affection through the performance of qualities that make her easy to love, easy to manage, easy to rely upon. Her anger may be treated as an inconvenience, her assertiveness as a difficulty, her refusal as a challenge to the harmony of the family. She learns that the approval of others can depend upon her willingness to make herself agreeable.

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What becomes of a girl whose deepest knowledge of belonging is connected to her ability to please? She may enter adolescence already skilled in recognising the emotional requirements of those around her. She may anticipate disappointment before it is expressed, detect changes in another person's mood and adjust herself accordingly. These abilities can be celebrated as empathy, maturity or emotional intelligence. Yet the question of whether they have emerged through freedom or necessity deserves far greater attention. The girl who has learned to preserve affection through accommodation may become a woman who experiences another person's dissatisfaction as a demand upon her own behaviour.

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The history of female sexual compliance begins within a culture that has repeatedly confused a woman's capacity for care with her obligation to surrender herself. And the boys are receiving their own instructions.

 

A boy discovers what it means to be a man within a world that may welcome his confidence while regarding his vulnerability with suspicion. He learns which emotions are permitted to accompany masculinity, which experiences expose him to ridicule and what forms of behaviour are rewarded as evidence of strength. He may be encouraged to compete, to conquer, to persevere in the face of refusal, to conceal the tenderness through which his need for connection becomes visible. His developing understanding of desire can become entangled with the demand to demonstrate that he possesses the qualities expected of a man.

We should consider the consequences of teaching boys that their value depends upon their capacity to prevail.

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For a boy who has learned to associate masculinity with conquest may eventually encounter another person's desire as a measure of his own worth. Their acceptance confirms him. Their refusal threatens something he has been taught to defend. His longing becomes accompanied by the fear of humiliation, and the person towards whom that longing is directed may be made responsible for restoring the dignity he believes has been diminished. A culture that teaches boys to experience vulnerability as weakness should be deeply concerned about the forms through which their longing may eventually seek expression.

And we should be equally concerned about what has been taken from them.

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For tenderness is a human capacity before it becomes something a culture assigns to femininity. The desire to be held, to be known, to experience affection freely and to encounter another person through the uncertainty of intimacy belongs to boys as surely as to girls. Yet generations of boys have been encouraged to separate themselves from the very qualities through which emotional closeness becomes possible. They may be permitted anger where grief is discouraged, sexual pursuit where tenderness is concealed, confidence where uncertainty might reveal the limits of their understanding. The cost of this estrangement is carried into relationships with people who have been taught an opposing form of self-denial.

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One has learned to conceal vulnerability beneath the performance of strength. The other has learned to preserve connection through the surrender of her own needs. One may experience refusal as an injury to his worth. The other may experience refusal as a threat to the relationship. Their encounter has been prepared through years of cultural instruction, and each may understand the resulting difficulties as evidence of something personal, peculiar or inevitable about the nature of intimacy between women and men. We have taught them different forms of estrangement and called the consequences the natural relationship between the sexes.

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This is what makes the education of eros inseparable from the education of power. The meanings through which young people approach one another have been developing long before sexual desire enters their relationships. They have learned who is expected to pursue, who must accommodate, whose anger commands attention and whose discomfort can be dismissed. They have encountered models of love in which possession is confused with devotion, persistence with passion and the surrender of personal authority with proof of commitment.

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Then we introduce the language of consent, expecting a principle to transform a relationship with power that has been cultivated throughout childhood. Consent is essential. The recognition that every person possesses authority over their own body belongs among the most important achievements of our struggle for sexual freedom. Yet the ability to understand consent as more than a rule depends upon the meanings we have attached to bodily autonomy, desire and refusal within the ordinary relationships through which children develop. A young man may understand that a woman has the right to refuse while continuing to experience her refusal as a humiliation he must overcome. A young woman may know that she has the right to decline intimacy while feeling responsible for the disappointment her decision produces. The principle has been understood intellectually, while the emotional conditions through which it must be exercised remain shaped by older expectations.

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We should ask ourselves what it means to educate a generation about consent while continuing to organise love around the preservation of another person's approval. The freedom to refuse must be learned alongside the capacity to receive refusal. These are different expressions of the same recognition: that the human being before us possesses a life whose meanings extend beyond our own desires. The person who loves us may decline what we offer. The person we desire may choose differently from what we had hoped. Another person's hesitation may contain experiences we have yet to understand, and their uncertainty deserves the freedom to remain unresolved.

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We have given considerable attention to teaching people how to establish boundaries. We must become equally willing to examine the expectations through which others have learned to disregard them.

For a boundary can be recognised through language and still be undermined through disappointment, persuasion, withdrawal of affection or the suggestion that love requires something more. The ability to say no acquires its deepest meaning within relationships where that refusal is permitted to stand, where another person's longing is recognised without being granted authority over the body of the one desired.

And the child who has encountered such respect within ordinary relationships possesses an experience upon which a different understanding of intimacy may be built.

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I am troubled by how frequently our conversations about protecting children concern the dangers they must learn to anticipate, while the conditions through which those dangers emerge remain comparatively undisturbed. Girls are instructed to be careful, to recognise inappropriate attention, to manage the risks associated with their developing bodies. These are matters of genuine importance. But there is a terrible injustice in a culture that continues to educate girls in the management of male sexual behaviour while directing insufficient attention towards changing the meanings of masculinity through which entitlement has been sustained.

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A girl should inherit more than an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the dangers she may encounter. And a boy deserves more than a version of manhood whose authority must continually be established through the conquest of others. We must be willing to imagine an education that challenges the very arrangements through which these expectations have acquired their power. One in which boys encounter vulnerability as part of their humanity, where tenderness can be expressed freely, and where another person's refusal carries no implication that their own worth has been diminished. One in which girls discover that their desires belong to them, that their boundaries require no elaborate justification and that the preservation of another person's affection is never a sufficient reason to abandon themselves.

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Such an education must extend beyond what we tell children about sexuality. It must concern the relationships through which they discover what it means to be human. A child learns about power by observing who is permitted to become angry and whose anger must be concealed. They discover the meanings of care through the distribution of labour within the family. They learn about personal authority by watching what happens when one adult disagrees with another, whose needs are regarded as legitimate and whose wishes repeatedly give way. The relationship between parents, or between the adults who raise a child, becomes part of the child's earliest understanding of how love and power coexist.

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What are we teaching when a woman is expected to preserve the emotional wellbeing of everyone around her while her own exhaustion remains unacknowledged? What is communicated when the labour through which family life becomes possible is treated as an expression of feminine nature rather than as a responsibility belonging to the people who benefit from it? What does a child learn when a father's anger governs the atmosphere of the household, or when a mother's dissatisfaction can only be expressed through silence?

 

These arrangements become intimate truths long before they can be recognised as cultural expectations. Their significance reaches beyond sexuality into the very foundations of how a person comes to understand what they are entitled to expect from love. We have asked women to give so much of themselves in the name of devotion that the distinction between love and self-abandonment can become difficult to recognise. We have encouraged men to associate authority with masculinity while diminishing the forms of tenderness through which genuine emotional intimacy might become possible. The children who grow within these arrangements may inherit their meanings even when the adults themselves consciously reject the values that produced them.

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This is why the transformation of our erotic inheritance demands more than a change in the words through which we educate the next generation. It requires an examination of the ordinary conditions under which children experience love. I want us to consider what it would mean for a daughter to grow up among women who possess the authority to determine the meanings of their own lives. Women whose care for others emerges within a relationship with themselves that is equally worthy of attention. Women who recognise their need for rest, their capacity for pleasure, their ambitions and their desires as dimensions of humanity deserving of recognition. Women whose lives demonstrate that love can be offered generously while personal authority remains intact.

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And I want us to consider what it would mean for a son to encounter men who are capable of tenderness without shame, who recognise another person's autonomy without experiencing it as a challenge to their own, and whose understanding of strength includes the ability to acknowledge vulnerability. Men who have discovered that their dignity depends neither upon sexual conquest nor upon the submission of others, and who are able to experience desire as an invitation towards intimacy rather than a demand for confirmation of their worth. Such possibilities may seem ordinary. Their consequences could be extraordinary.

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For we are describing a world in which the qualities necessary for intimacy are permitted to belong to every human being, where the capacity to care carries no obligation to surrender oneself, and where strength becomes compatible with the recognition of another person's freedom. Yet I am equally concerned by the contemporary expectation that children should inherit our aspirations towards liberation as though those aspirations were already the truth of their own lives.

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We have begun to speak of breaking generational patterns, healing ancestral wounds and raising children who will finally be free from the shame and limitations of those who came before them. These ambitions can arise from profound love. They may reflect a genuine determination to offer children possibilities that earlier generations were denied. But we should be cautious of placing upon the next generation the responsibility to become evidence that our own healing has succeeded.

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A daughter is entitled to a life whose meaning extends beyond the redemption of her mother's suffering. She may wish to live differently from the women who raised her. She may challenge their understanding of femininity, sexuality, marriage and love. She may discover pleasures and forms of intimacy that earlier generations struggled to imagine. Yet she may also choose a life that resembles theirs in ways they would recognise. She may find fulfilment through domestic life, through a committed relationship, through forms of devotion that possess meanings entirely her own. Her desires may challenge contemporary ideals of sexual confidence as readily as they challenge the moral expectations of the past.

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Her freedom must include the authority to disappoint our expectations of what a liberated woman should become. Otherwise, we risk giving her another ideal of femininity whose demands have already been determined before she has had the opportunity to discover herself. The same responsibility belongs to the way we imagine the futures of boys. A son may choose forms of masculinity that differ from those we have celebrated, question the assumptions through which strength has been understood or discover tenderness through relationships we had never anticipated. His freedom requires the possibility of becoming a man whose humanity exceeds the expectations through which masculinity has been organised.

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And children whose desires, identities or bodies challenge our familiar categories deserve more than the conditional acceptance offered when their lives can be made to conform to what we already understand. They deserve the recognition that their experiences possess meanings which may extend beyond our own imagination, and that love can accompany them into territories we have yet to explore. There is an enormous difference between offering a child the freedom to discover who they are and asking them to become the person through whom our ideals of freedom will be fulfilled.

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The children who follow us will inherit a world whose meanings are shaped by our choices, but their lives will belong to them. They may question our understanding of eros, challenge the ideals through which we have sought liberation and recognise limitations within our thinking that remain invisible to us. Their desires may emerge through circumstances we cannot anticipate, carrying possibilities whose significance belongs to a future beyond our own. And if we are serious about erotic freedom, we must be willing to welcome that uncertainty.

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For the authority to determine the meaning of one's own desire belongs equally to those whose choices affirm our understanding of liberation and those whose choices challenge it. I want us to recognise the extraordinary responsibility contained within the ordinary act of raising a child. We are entrusted with a human being whose life will eventually extend beyond our authority, whose desires will possess meanings we may never fully understand, and whose relationship with the body must become their own. Our responsibility is to offer protection, knowledge and care while making room for the gradual emergence of an autonomy that may one day lead them away from the expectations through which we have understood ourselves.

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The child must be permitted to become a person whose life belongs to them. And this demands something difficult of adults who have inherited generations of cultural anxiety around sexuality. It asks us to examine the difference between protecting a child and requiring them to inhabit our fears. It asks us to recognise when our desire for their safety becomes an attempt to control the possibilities of their lives. It requires us to challenge the shame through which our own desires were regulated, while acknowledging that our children may encounter questions whose meanings differ from those we were taught to anticipate.

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We owe them an understanding of sexuality that possesses moral seriousness, intellectual honesty and a deep regard for the complexity of human life. They deserve knowledge of their bodies, of consent, of pleasure and the responsibilities that accompany intimacy. They deserve relationships in which questions can be asked without humiliation, uncertainty can be expressed without pressure and their developing autonomy is respected alongside the protection appropriate to childhood. But they also deserve an education in the wider meaning of eros.

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I want a child to discover pleasure first as something belonging to the experience of being alive. In movement, in music, in the extraordinary delight of becoming absorbed in an activity whose purpose lies entirely within the joy it brings. In the pleasure of curiosity, the discovery of beauty, the freedom to imagine and create, the experience of being welcomed into relationships where affection requires no performance. These are encounters through which a human being may come to recognise that their own experience possesses value.

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What happens when the pleasure of learning becomes subordinated to the necessity of performance? When creativity is valued primarily through its usefulness, when the body is approached as something to discipline, improve or display, when even childhood leisure becomes another opportunity for development? We have become remarkably willing to fill young lives with activities intended to secure their future success, while granting comparatively little recognition to the value of experiences whose meaning resides entirely within the present.

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A child who delights in dancing, drawing, singing or the sensual experience of the natural world is encountering a dimension of life whose worth exceeds the expectations of productivity. Their pleasure possesses significance independent of whether it develops into a talent, an achievement or a quality that others may admire. Such experiences can contribute to an understanding of the self as someone whose relationship with life matters beyond the purposes assigned to them by the surrounding culture.

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And this is precisely the understanding that so many adults are now being encouraged to reclaim. We are invited to return to our bodies, recover our creativity, rediscover pleasure and recognise that our lives contain possibilities beyond obligation and achievement. Yet we continue to raise children within arrangements that can diminish these capacities long before they have had the opportunity to flourish. There is a profound contradiction in celebrating the reclamation of eros while participating in a culture that teaches children to regard their value primarily through what they accomplish, how they appear and the approval they receive.

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What if the work of erotic liberation required us to challenge the conditions through which children become estranged from their own aliveness in the first place? What if we recognised that the freedom to experience pleasure begins through the ordinary permission to exist beyond the demands of usefulness? That a child deserves opportunities for curiosity, imagination, movement, rest and the private discovery of what brings them joy? That the capacity to recognise desire is cultivated partly through relationships in which personal experience is treated as meaningful, rather than continually interpreted through the expectations of adults? Such recognition would require us to examine much more than the way we teach sexuality. It would demand a different understanding of what children are for.

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For children have so often been treated as extensions of the ambitions, fears and identities of those who raise them. Their achievements can become evidence of parental success, their behaviour a reflection upon family respectability, their choices confirmations or betrayals of the values through which their elders have organised their lives. They may be loved profoundly while carrying expectations whose fulfilment has become inseparable from the emotional needs of adults.

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The child whose existence becomes responsible for securing another person's worth has already encountered an arrangement of power that may follow them into intimate life. We should be willing to confront this because the freedom to belong to ourselves is shaped through the relationships in which we first experience belonging to others. Love can offer the security through which individuality becomes possible. It can also become the condition through which a person learns to subordinate their desires to the preservation of another's approval. The difference between these experiences depends upon the authority we are prepared to grant to those we love.

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I want us to imagine relationships in which children discover that affection survives disagreement, that their boundaries can be recognised even when their preferences create inconvenience, and that their worth remains secure when they disappoint the expectations of others. I want boys to learn that tenderness belongs to their strength, and girls to discover that their capacity for care can exist alongside the full authority of their own desires. I want the next generation to encounter bodies as sources of experience before they are taught to measure them through desirability, productivity or performance. To understand intimacy as an encounter between people whose freedom remains intact. To recognise pleasure as a dimension of human life worthy of attention, and desire as something whose expression carries responsibilities towards others.

And I want us to recognise that such possibilities require a willingness to transform the world in which children are growing.

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For the inheritance of sexual harm has been sustained through more than the ignorance of previous generations. It has been carried through relationships whose expectations were treated as natural, through institutions that assigned unequal authority to different bodies, and through the ordinary practices of families whose members were themselves attempting to survive within the conditions available to them.

We have inherited those conditions, and our knowledge of their consequences places a responsibility upon us.

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The women who came before us lived within arrangements that frequently required their accommodation. The men who shaped our understanding of masculinity inherited expectations that constrained tenderness and confused authority with power over others. Their children received these meanings through love, fear, example and the countless ordinary interactions through which culture becomes intimate. We are now in a position to question what earlier generations were often required to accept. And the significance of that position lies in what we are prepared to change.

 

The children who follow us deserve more than the promise that they will one day possess the resources to heal the injuries our culture continues to create. They deserve our willingness to confront those injuries at their source, to challenge the expectations through which domination is disguised as love, and to recognise that the authority of each human being over their own body and desire belongs among the foundations of a society worthy of its people. They deserve adults who understand that love carries responsibilities far greater than the demand to be loved in return. For the freedom we claim to seek will be measured through the lives of those who inherit the world we are creating. If we are to speak of reclaiming eros, let us be willing to ask what we are teaching the children who have yet to lose their relationship with it. Let us examine the ways we have taught them to mistrust their bodies, conceal their tenderness, apologise for their boundaries and seek confirmation of their worth through the expectations of others. Let us consider what becomes possible when love ceases to demand the surrender of the self as evidence of its devotion. For the deepest responsibility we carry towards the next generation is to offer them a world in which the experience of being fully human requires no apology. A child who has been permitted to belong to themselves may one day enter the world of love with a freedom that generations before them struggled to imagine.