Sexually active and seductive at any cost!

Interview with the sexologist Jole Baldaro Verde. There are too many expectancies, it is necessary to be careful. Today male teenagers are in crisis because they would like a more aggressive penis, not a small one!

by Antonella Casilli

Jole Baldaro Verde is considered one of the greater experts in the international scientific scene. She taught Theory of personality at University of Genoa, where she later founded the Scuola superiore di sessuologia. She is author of various books, such as Gli specchi dell'eros maschile (Cortina, 2005), La sessualità tra piacere, colpa e vergogna (Edizioni Universitarie Romane, 2001), Illusioni d'amore (Cortina, 1992), L'enigma dell'identità. Il transessualismo (Gruppo Abele, 1991), Lo spazio dell'illusione. Viaggio intorno alla coppia (Cortina, 1990), Donna, maschere e ombre. Ontogenesi dell'identità femminile (Cortina, 1987).

Jole Baldaro Verde

More and more frequently, assisted fecundation is proposed as a response to compensate for the sterility of the couple, you did it with the book “Having a child or being a parent” twenty years ago for the first time
I wrote it as part of a congress, when people began speaking of children like a right. I was opposed to it because it means not accepting the limits of the human condition, while we are developing a sense of omnipotence: we must be sexually active till 120 years of age, seductive and have children whenever we would like to. The problem is having children, or being parents, which means that a responsible maternity or paternity should realize when we are ready to give our children what they need. We often consider our children as a mirror to our own identity. That is to say, if we have not attained a fulfilled identity – in the contexts of our job, seductiveness, social accomplishment – we feel like deprived of an identity.
Men’s identity has been linked to working activities, women’s to being mother, for thousands of years. In the past centuries, being a respectable woman meant become mother, which in turn meant that many women who did not have any maternal instinct – and I do think not all women have it – ended up being what I called the “iron wire” mothers in some of my books, that is to say mothers who had to have children in order to be recognized as women. For them, their children represented the mirror of their identity, thus putting all the pressure of their expectancies on their children’s shoulders, because children who have to correspond to their mother identity, must be good looking, good in sports and in class.

Oh my goodness, so many expectancies!
Being a parent means accepting children for who they are, trying to respond to their needs, to their desires and, thus, growing them with respect to their own expectancies, not ours. A famous example is Edoardo Agnelli: his father wished he became a manager of FIAT, but he decided to study philosophy and he was unhappy because he was never allowed to be who he wanted to be. It ended up as we know: he committed suicide.

It seems to me that in your opinion the expectancies placed on children are the reason why you refuse children through assisted fecundation, children sought after for a long time, who could be object of even higher expectancies.
I will tell you more. Science has made women four wonderful gifts:
- first: contraceptives;
- second: I will make you laugh, but it is the sanitary towel; just think how a woman had to go to work before, she ended up being prisoner of menstruation at least one month per year;
- third: household appliances;
- fourth: the possibility to self realize in their career.
All of this has created a situation in which a woman can become mother or not; still, there are still women who think they will not have fulfilled their life unless they have a biological child and, for this reason, science has developed assisted fecundation.
I have said over and over that clinical centers where assisted fecundation is performed should assist women with a psychologist/sexuologist, who could verify the truest motivations to have a child, so that a child can be a child of life, not a child of miracle.

About scientific advancement, let’s talk about computer, youth living in virtual worlds. Reading your book Gli specchi dell'eros maschile (Raffaello Cortina Editore), I saw you got deep into the issue
World has changed and I would like to organize a conference on the theme of “Man and women castaways in the third millennium”. In our age, technology has modified things so much that communication has become totally different. The personal computer represents a companion, youth feel much alone because there are no other social places other than school; absurdly, nobody has ever mentioned full time for high school. When parents work, teenagers from 14 up 18 are often alone at home and most of them are also only children and maybe they cannot invite any friend over. Who can they talk to, then? In chat, they can find friends with their same problems, so they talk to them. Chats should not be demonized because they have positives sides for sure. Their negative aspects emerge when boys and girls only focus on them – as it has been the case in Japan lately – when they do not go out of their room and chat all day long, or when they live a virtual reality where their body is not put in play, because virtual reality does not call the body into play, even though cameras work for that, nowadays. When genitals are pictured like they had the utmost importance, then we have male teenagers in crisis because they have a small penis, not as aggressive as they wish.

In this regard, the example in Specchi dell’eros maschile of the movie Viol@ is striking. Do you think that homosexuality and seeking refuge in a virtual world are two sides of the same coin?
This is another issue. In my opinion, you are born homosexual. There are some cases, few cases, of so-called way-out homosexuality; at the same time, women have certainly become too aggressive, because in this famous cultural change, started in ’68 and progressed more and more happily, we have not been able to reinvent a new model of masculinity and femininity: this means that the sole winning model is the archaic model.

Here comes a question: speaking of homosexuality, how can you judge the exhibition of these days?
There has always been, in the world of animals too; we continue to be heirs to the Genesis, where the only possible sexual act was the heterosexual act. Homosexuality was accepted only by Greeks and, in part, by Romans. Afterwards, Christianity brought it outside of the normal jurisdiction and now sexual identity is gender identity.
The goal of sexuality is the sexual role that can be of father or mother. Unluckily, nowadays, jobs are still divided into jobs for men and for women. When the culture permits that homosexuality can be requested, people who always hid it, now show it off, exhibit it; it is a teenager-like reaction, anti-trend; that is to say, I depend on you but I go against you, because I detest you; the reaction of homosexuals is: I still depend on the opinion of mass culture, I am against you and I show off that homosexual is cool.

We reckon that being homosexuals is against nature, that is to say a person who is against the Genesis comes to the point of creating a fracture between science and faith. Still, the body should be theologically central…
The celibacy of priests and nuns has allowed many men and women to be protected by social blame, have a public role and being homosexual in their private life.

But the Church does not give answers about the contradictions of the body…
Christianity has been a great revolution; Catholicism brought it back, San Paul was a misogynist with problems.