Essay:History Of Intergenerational Relationships

by Seamus

The story of intergenerational relationships is almost the story of humanity itself. Such relationships came to be the norm in human society because they were the best answer to a social need.

A bit of background may be helpful here. Men are drawn to young females for a practical biological reason: the young ones offer the best chance for the male's progeny to live long enough to carry on his lineage, and extend his genes into the next generation.

When the average life expectancy is 30 years or less, as it was until the turn of the twentieth century, people do not wait until they are 25 to begin families. In Jewish tradition, a boy undergoes Bar Mitzvah, or the rite of passage into adulthood, at age 13; a girl has her corresponding Bat Mitzvah at age 12.

A bride who gives birth at 12 or 13, as Mary, the mother of Jesus, is regarded by Biblical scholars as having done, will be able to nurture and guide her offspring until their teen years even if she dies at the expected thirty. A 25-year-old bride who dies at 30 will be leaving helpless young children behind to fend for themselves.

There are obvious biological reasons why the husband has traditionally been the breadwinner and the wife has been the homemaker: the husband could not replace the wife as the bearer of children; her role was indispensable to the future of the race.

As Philip Ariès documented in Centuries of Childhood, for most of human history childhood ended by the age of six. Extended childhood is a relatively recent phenomenon brought about by the advent of compulsory schooling in the 19th Century [not to mention the simultaneous advent of the Industrial Revolution--D]. Before then, at the age of seven, a boy was apprenticed to a man to learn a trade, and a girl learned the domestic arts from her mother.

It was usually a decade, or a decade and a half, before the boy was ready to create his “master” piece (if he were a cabinetmaker’s apprentice, for example) to be submitted to the guild for examination and judging. If his piece passed scrutiny, he was considered a “passed” master and given the title of journeyman, allowing him to begin earning wages in his craft. Yet it would still be many years before he was established enough in his profession to feel financially secure. Other professions were similar.

Twenty-five years of age was usually the earliest at which a man could feel truly ready to accept the responsibility of marriage and all that it entailed; in most cases it was much later. Those who took a bride for the first time while in their thirties, or who were widowers, were well aware that their days were numbered. They naturally sought a young bride to have and care for their children, because at least she would still be around to see to their upbringing even if he were not. He owed it to his children to see that one of their parents lived long enough to care for them.

For the girl, it was also the best possible choice. Marrying a man who was in the prime of his earning years was much more practical than marrying someone who could not, and might not ever be able to, support her and her offspring.

The man traded his wealth and worldly goods for a young, pretty bride; she traded her youth and attractiveness for the financial security necessary for her to raise a family, thus ensuring that her genes were passed on to posterity. It was a win-win situation. Nor did every girl wait until puberty to begin marriage, as child brides were common for a number of reasons. In India, when the Muslim invaders began carrying off unmarried Hindu girls to be their concubines, the natives faced a real possibility that, with no females to bear children, their culture would perish (the Koran allows a man four wives and as many concubines as he can support; hence, the religion’s rapid rise in popularity). The Indians discovered a loophole in the Koran that saved their culture: a married female may not be pressed into concubinage. The Indians immediately began marrying the remaining girls, and established the practice of betrothal at birth, followed by a wedding ceremony when the girl could walk. The girls, of course, returned home after the ceremony to live with their own families until they were old enough to begin marriage.

The Europeans had a different rationale: it is common knowledge that children need their mother more than the husband needs her, so when the first child is born the mother's attention naturally turns to the baby. It was therefore common for girls to marry quite some time before puberty in the hopes of bonding with their husbands and forging a strong relationship to sustain the marriage through the difficult times ahead. This was especially in the arranged marriages, so as to ensure a dynasty or cement an alliance.

When James Madison was 32, after he wrote the Constitution of the United States, but before he became President, he became engaged to a 16-year-old who jilted him. The man with whom she ran away later died. Madison did not get romantically involved again until his forties, when he met a teenager named Dolly. He married her when he was forty-five.

When Elvis Presley met Priscilla, she was 13, although he waited until she was 18 to marry her.

Edgar Allan Poe's wife Victoria was thirteen.

Dante met Beatrice when she was eight [according to some sources--D].

The middle-aged Charles Dickens had a teenaged girlfriend, who was an actress that stayed with him until he died.

The future King Louis XVI of France married Princess Marie Antoinette when she was fourteen.

Closer to home, contemporaries who fell for underage girls include rocker Jerry Lee Lewis, and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones.

All of this began to change when compulsory schooling became the law. The state governments mandated forced schooling but left it to the separate communities to finance compliance. One-room schoolhouses, which had been the norm, soon were replaced with buildings designed to hold children in distinct rooms, separated by age groups. Although testing and grading each individual by ability was the obvious path to follow, the cash-strapped school districts opted for the faster and cheaper (and decidedly inferior) method of segregating the children by age.

Instead of entering the real world with adults of all ages, as apprentices at the age of seven, children were confined in an artificial world populated only by other kids their own age. This had profound consequences: instead of being educated by all of the adults in the community, and getting a varied perspective on life, children received information only from the educators, i.e., the indoctrinators.

The school’s function in loco parentis has been repeatedly sanctified by the courts. It was not difficult to channel the educational direction towards the judgmental “thou shalt not” attitude which had served so well to control the masses for so long.

The schools repeatedly drive home the lesson of abstinence for a practical reason: survival is the basic instinct. Once an organism’s own safety is assured, it begins to seek ways of passing its genes on to the next generation, in a bid for immortality. Taking sex away from the people allows them to be controlled at the molecular level. Forbid sex, bottle up the urge inside, then occasionally allow the people to kill a scapegoat - such as the Iraqis - for cathartic release, and voila! Societal control. This strategy has been used by every religion, every despot, every dictator since time immemorial. Why? Because it works.

After years of being confined to their age peers, quite naturally kids begin dating their contemporaries - who else do they know? Sex is forbidden them, along with birth control and factual sex education; the only approved outlet for their urges is marriage. Soon comes the relentless pressure to begin a family, and before they know it, the couple becomes three.

As soon as a baby is born, the honeymoon is truly over. Now this young man finds himself facing a lifetime’s burden after a few months of happiness. Is it any wonder that he feels cheated, used, and betrayed? He isn’t grown up, nor could maturity be expected from someone whom society has kept in a perpetual state of extended childhood from his infancy.

Finally he is away from parents and teachers, able to truly enjoy himself, and suddenly he is a burdened with the responsibilities of being a family man.

His bride is also disillusioned to realize that he is not as mature as she had hoped. They will do the best that they can, but their marriage, like the majority, was doomed before it began.

Will she seek someone older and more mature, who would consider a family to be a blessing? Or will she continue to fall for Hollywood and Madison Avenue's relentless ageism? Statistically, yes.

Meanwhile, the divorce proceedings will strip the man of most of his assets, while the “woman wronged” will be convinced that all men are rotten. Both of them are victims of the taboo against intergenerational relationships.

In our society, three classes of people are incarcerated against their will: criminals are kept in prisons, the insane are kept in mental institutions, and children are kept in schools. Of the three groups, children are the future of the society, yet they are isolated form everyone except their age peers, whose life experiences are virtually identical to their own. Children are denied any information about the world except that transmitted by the indoctrinators or the electronic baby-sitter, i.e., television, whose aims coincide with the oppressors. By segregating the old, who have seen through the system and are aware of its flaws, from the young who could change that system, control is maintained.

With the rise of the corporate state, many in the clergy feared for their positions, yet their fears were groundless: the corporate state needed the mind-numbing church dogma to instill docility in the masses. And, the constant haranguing of the churches against sex, kept this form of empowering liberation in the "do not examine closely" area.

It did not take long to extend the concept of Sunday school to the entire week. Combined with the week-long brain-deadening of the "educational" system, all that remained was for television to provide the mind candy that deflects from any real examination of the status quo, and the mental shackles were in place.

The hysteria against intergenerational relationships has a practical basis for the power structure, as it is one of the tools used to maintain the masses in a perpetual state of ignorance and docility.