The magical age of 10

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This article has examined the hypothesis that sexual attraction emerges after the advent of adrenal puberty, typically precipitating the development of stable and memorable sexual attraction by the age of 10 across cultures. Two pubertal processes - adrenarche and later gonadarche - are suggested as doing the work of maturation, including the development of phenotypic gonadarche, with important implications for the emergence of sexual awareness and behavior. This argument effectively expands the period of "puberty" to encompass a wider span of human development after the age of 6. It also suggests that the emergence of attraction, as found in the New Guinea cultures - both in homoerotic and heteroerotic forms, and in the contemporary United States among males and females in both homosexuals and heterosexuals - may constitute a good candidate for being a human universal of sexuality.

Middle childhood should no longer be viewed as a period of hormonal quiescence. Nor should we believe that for all children, there is an absence of sexual subjectivity before gonadarche. Rather, the accumulating evidence suggests that there is more sexual subjectivity occurring during childhood than previously believed, especially from the age of 6 onward, with the onset of adrenarche. The key in the United States is that between the fourth and fifth grades, the child's sexual attractions have already begun to stabilize or consolidate, becoming robust and memorable, suggesting the results of an earlier developmental process. The stability of the attraction is manifest by its memorability, accessible even in late adulthood. When thinking of how sexual risk-taking is regarded in development, and is sensitive to the context of relationships, it is critical to reconsider the early onset of sexual attraction before adolescence and its implications for social policy (Ehrhardt, 1996).

Although cross-cultural differences in the meanings of sexual arousal and attraction are impressive, the evidence for a deeper structure of adrenal hormonal development that influences the sequence and timing of sexual attraction before adolescence is profound. This is not to say that cultures may of course thwart the emergence of developmental subjectivities of sexual attraction in late childhood, through the use of beliefs, taboos, rituals, and social gender roles. Are the internal processes associated with adrenal puberty robust enough to overcome these social barriers in the development of individual development of the body and fantasy before gonadal puberty? We do not know the answer to this question; however, as Freud (1905) speculated long ago, cultures may exercise an enormous constraint upon the emergence of sexuality and hence, the subjective memory of, as well as the expression of, sexual aim and object attractions. When a culture completely denies or "forgets" the earlier experience of childhood upon adult development, we have what Benedict (1938) once referred to as "cultural discontinuity." It is tempting to argue that if attraction typically develops during adrenarche but is ignored or repressed by adults’ retrospection about sexual development, particularly before it becomes stabilized around the age of 10, the contemporary United States may be a good example of a society in which discontinuity in sexuality is a common developmental experience, and may affect the memory of earliest sexual attraction (Herdt, 1990). Because male and female, as well as homosexual and heterosexual experiences of attraction were found before the age of 10, the internal representation of sexual attraction is robust and memorable enough to overcome these societal constraints (McClintock and Herdt, 1996).

We should not ignore the context of political power in the social regulation of childhood and adolescent sexuality. In precolonial New Guinea, it may well have been the case that adrenal puberty led to sexual attraction in ways that directly or indirectly challenged male power and gender hierarchy. Clearly, the implementation of strict avoidance taboos and gender segregation constitute powerful indicators of adult male authority and the attempt to control adolescent sexual attraction and behavior. The need for strict identification with the same-gender parent, and political solidarity in times of warfare, may have produced a general structural effort to exaggerate gender differences and assert sexual control. These points lead to a generalization about the New Guinea societies: When a society worries over the effects of early gender development, and the expression of sexual attraction before adulthood, its folk psychology and institutions will implement controls on the child's sexuality well before gonadarche. It is remarkable that our own postindustrial society continues to exert similar powerful controls over childhood sexuality in the face of enormous change and access to sexual knowledge and the media. Sexuality in the western liberal democracies, it would seem, is still a challenge to forces of social regulation and authority. That western and nonwestern societies have focused upon the age of 10 as a memory marker for development is thus no coincidence, but neither should it be regarded as a great mystery. The age of 10 is not magical - only a convenience marker in the cultural reasoning of societies about powerful hormonal processes.

source: Conclusion from article 'The Magical Age of 10' by Gilbert Herdt (Ph.D.) & Martha McClintock (Ph.D.); www.ipce.info/sites/ipce.info/files/biblio_attachments/herdt_-_the_magical_age_of_10_2000.pdf; Archives of Sexual Behavior, Vol. 29, No. 6; 2000