http://www.heraldsun.com.au/opinion/no-sex-please-were-tots/story-e6frfhqf-1225867929142excerpt
HOW would you react if you found out an adult had been in your three or four-year-old's childcare centre asking the following questions:
"Do boys give you the dreamy eye?"
"Are you a flirt?"
"Have you ever kissed a boy?"
If a carer asked these questions, I would be complaining to management in no uncertain terms.
If someone off the street tried to ask these questions, I would be calling the cops
So why is it acceptable for Monash University academic Mindy Blaise to be asking three and four-year-olds these exact questions, as part of her ongoing study into what she calls post-structuralist and queer theory?
Sure, the questions come from an illustration in a popular Clarice Bean book by Lauren Child. But it doesn't make any difference. Regardless of the source, they are still inappropriate.
As she details in a paper in the latest Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, Blaise wants to show that young children are already sexual beings and that she is just creating a safe space for them in which they can express their "sexual knowledge".
In fact, she even wants the early childhood curriculum to be changed to give teachers a chance to "engage with children differently about their sexual knowledge".
In one experiment in an Australian childcare centre (she won't say which one), she gets the children to photograph objects or dolls they think are cool, sexy or pretty, and in another to respond to a photograph of two crocodiles kissing. One of the children notes that "one is a boy and one is a girl".
Blaise responds: "Heather (the child) has drawn upon the heterosexual matrix in her naming of the crocodiles as complementary genders. In doing so, the possibility of imagining same-sex desire has been closed off."
Is it just me, or does Blaise actually seem disappointed that some kids aren't showing signs of being gay?
Now I know one in 10 kids will end up being gay, and I sincerely wish them well with it.
But maybe we could wait a few more years before we need to encourage them to use their own bodies and minds to challenge the "heterosexual matrix".
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