The thead on mesmerized by hamsters got me to thinking.
When I was a little kid I remember being mesmerized by the singer Sheena Easton. My mother said, I would be fussy even as a child and stop whenever her voice came on the radio. This was the early 80s when she was on a lot. Or if a video of her came on TV, I’d sit hypnotically and watch it.
Now obviously I was under 5 years old at the time, so my question is when a kid this young has a “crush” on someone, does it have a sexual component to it?
I mean I am a straight male, and Sheene Easton was awful pretty, and a great accent, which she now doesn’t use much.
And I’m not sure crush is even the right word to use. I mean I’ve seen other kids have attachment to blankets, but I used to love to hear Sheena Easton sing, even before I can remmber, according to my mother and older siblings.
It’s be like he’s fussy, plop him down in front of a Sheena Easton music video and he’ll stop. Just like some kids seem mesmerized by tele tubbies or whatever.
I don’t remember feeling anything sexual about it. But I was wonderig if these fascinations with people by very young children have a sexual element to them?
We were watching a video of Who Framed Roger Rabbit one Christmas. My nephew, who was 3 at the time, was running around like a cyclone. In the first scene that Jessica Rabbit was in, he stopped cold in his tracks and stared at the TV, looking like this: :eek: We tried to distract him, but he was undistractable.
The guy who played the “fire guy” in the Jessica Alba version of Fantastic Four.
Orlando Bloom in Lord of the Rings. I even started a thread on this, prompted when she asked “Mommy, isn’t he just dreamy? I love his long, golden, elven hair!” In her honor, we renamed the character “Legolove”.
When I was a little kid in the early '70s, I had a major crush on Willy Wonka, as played by Gene Wilder. I was 5 or 6 so I don’t think there was a sexual component to it per se, but I thought he was interesting looking and very, very cool, and I have no doubt that he influenced my taste in men over the years (I like very intelligent, slightly (harmlessly) daffy guys with wicked senses of humor and highly developed sarcasm skills).
When I was five, I was taken to see Return of the Jedi and subsequently developed a big crush on Han Solo/Harrison Ford. I used to imagine my teddy bear was Han Solo as I curled up with it to sleep. In comparison, I also thought Princess Leia was really cool, just as cool as Han Solo, but I didn’t pretend any of my stuffed animals were her – I pretended to be her. So I could be with Han Solo, of course. I had no concept of sex at that age and, being a girl, had no discernable physical reaction to the thought of that character, but there was definitely something to those feelings that fell under the broad category of “sexuality.”
I don’t think people before puberty feel sexual attraction, specifically. This doesn’t mean you can’t think someone is “cute” though. I remember liking some of the girls and wanting to be like some of the boys in public school, but sex was just an incomprehensibility that I didn’t think much about.
My youngest son was a baby when Regis Philbin started doing *Who Wants To Be A Millionaire * and all of a sudden he (Regis) was everywhere. My son was completely mesmerized, not only by the show itself with it’s flashing lights and duh-duh-duh music, but with Regis. It was definitely a weird little fascination/stalkery thing he had for him for a couple of years. But I’m sure it wasn’t anything sexual.
Well, given that most of these fascinations are with members of the opposite sex, and that most people are heterosexual, it seems to me that a sexual component of some sort is pretty likely. A test for this would be whether the childhood “crushes” of homosexuals were disproportionately of the same sex.
My crushes as a kid were all on girls. They may not have been sexual in the sense of arousal, but they were certainly sexual in the sense of orientation.
My understanding from a few articles and books I’ve read (okay, so some of them include What to Expect: the Toddler Years, which isn’t exactly the end-all, be-all of toddler behavior, but it’s good reference) is that kids are more sexual than adults give them credit for. Obviously it’s not in the same way an adult is; however, they do notice gender differences and gravitate toward their preferred sex from a very early age. Also, the What to Expect book indicated that sexual arousal is supposed to start early as well, which is one of the reasons they mention that when a kid becomes more aware of what’s going on around him/her that coed nudity is probably not advisable with opposite sex family members since it can be confusing.
Both my kids started groping themselves at a far earlier age than I expected (I have a son and a daughter), but it’s apparently normal. I just follow what my pediatrician told me - don’t make them feel bad about it, just calmly tell them that what they’re doing is private, so they should do it when people aren’t around. My son went through a phase that was really awkward for me when he’d keep flashing me and giving me details about his, er, equipment. Luckily, that stopped.
Anyway, my son keeps saying he wants to marry me and that, when he does, I’ll have two husbands. I’ve tried to explain that polygamy doesn’t generally work, but he’s not buying it. He proposes to most females he really likes, though, so I’m not too concerned about it.
This is a super interesting topic. When I was a kid (kindergarten age, I can’t remember before that), I was obsessed with Leonardo, the blue ninja turtle (he was the leader). To the point where he became my imaginary friend and we would fight bad guys together. I’ve never been a furry, nor do I have any proclivities toward amphibian relations. But I think it still qualifies as a crush. Leonardo was definitely a guy. He could very well qualify for the reason my favorite color is blue, and throughout childhood I always prized strong leadership skills as a desirable quality.
I stumbled across my first grade journal, which my mom had kept for many years, and I waxed on about Leonardo a whole lot, hehe.
As a youngster I recall the oddball crushes I had: one of the characters in some kind of cartoon - they were winged and wore helmets and had vaguely anime-ish qualities; The Black Stallion - horses made my heart pitter patter, but they had to be boy horses; Luke Duke; Luke Skywalker; and finally I moved on to Rick Springfield, Michael Jackson, and then Duran Duran. Fickle, I was.
I was just thinking about this. When I was young, I really liked watching scenes involving someone being hypnotized (Mina and the Count, the snake scene from The Jungle Book). I don’t think the feelings I got were sexual, exactly, but whatever the precursor to sexuality is in a young child’s brain. Now that I’m an adult, I have a slight fetish for being dominated or controlled, as my “hypno-fetish” as a child might indicate.
Bob, from Seasame Street. I was 5 and I wanted him. For what I had no idea, but all I could think of was that he made my tummy feel funny and I wanted him to be MINE! My God, if I knew how, I would have been his stalker. I still think he’s kind of sexy.
Oh, wow, I’d forgotten about that. I had a crush on Bob too! That was even before Willy Wonka. But Willy definitely blew Bob away in my romance department, once I encountered him.
I was probably 10 when I developed this huge crush on Ryne Sandberg (Hall of Fame second baseman for the Chicago Cubs for the non-baseball fans). My dad was determined that one of his girls would turn into a sports fan, and it worked with me. All he had to do was let me see that cute guys played baseball… and football… and hockey…
