Harmful to Minors

 But Peter Givler, executive director of the Association of American University Presses, responded with a diplomatic, slickly evasive statement: “All great universities promote freedom of inquiry, but that freedom is empty without the will to publish its results, no matter how unpopular or controversial. Association of American University Presses stands behind the University of Minnesota Press decision to bring out Harmful to Minors, and we applaud the University of Minnesota for its courage and determination in upholding its press.” 

The attack on Levine and her book is the same sort of well-orchestrated effort we have seen from the right in the past. What is shocking is that the University of Minnesota is apparently refusing to fight it. Even worse, the down- and-dirty tactics of Dr. Laura and the CWA have centered not on the book, but on Levine (who has mentioned in interviews that as a minor she had an affair with an older man), as well as on former surgeon general Dr. Joycelyn Elders, who wrote the book’s foreword. In his March 28 press release, Knight wrote: “Not content to advocate for adults teaching children to masturbate, [Elders] is giving cover for adults having sex with kids—so long as the kids give their consent. Everybody except for the molesters and their apologists knows that children cannot give meaningful consent to sex. Everybody knows that children are coerced into giving ‘consent,’ and that the damage can last a lifetime. The author of this book, Judith Levine, is Exhibit A. She was molested as a child and now advocates it for other children.” 

The vehemence fueling the attack on Harmful to Minors springs in part from Levine’s head-on confrontation with the ever-increasing cultural backlash against discussing children and sex. Of course, parents have always been concerned with the moral well-being of their children—think of how old folks fretted about wild new dances such as the Black Bottom and the Charleston in the 1920s, or the perils posed by Elvis and rock and roll in the 1950s. But as Levine points out in an interview with the Boston Phoenix, the meaning and intent of these worries has changed radically over the past two decades. “There has probably never been a time when adults didn’t think that the younger population was going to hell in a hand-basket, but for most of that time the politics about child protectionism were actually about children,” she notes. “There has been a strategic shift in the past 20 years. Since, say, the Anita Bryant campaigns in the late 1970s, the right has used the idea of protecting children to impose their sense of decency and morality on everyone.” Bryant’s campaign was called Save Our Children, but the Miami gay-rights law she campaigned against had nothing to do with children. It had to do with the right’s obsession with homosexuality and its ability to use homophobic fears to spearhead a broad range of other agendas, including dismantling education programs, instituting prayer in school, attacking public funding for child care, and abolishing affirmative action. 

It is important to remember that these campaigns, no matter how benighted they may seem after the fact, often do enormous harm. Bryant’s call to repeal the Miami-Dade gay rights law was successful and the measure has never been reinstated. The daycare center cases led to incredible miscarriages of the legal process and the court system. Child-porn concerns have led to the craze for Internet filters in public libraries (which the American Library Association and the ACLU are still valiantly battling). “Megan’s Laws,” under which neighborhoods were to be notified if a “sex offender” moved in, gave way to the widespread emergence of sexual predator notification programs and sexual offender registries— most of which have been deemed deeply flawed by law-enforcement experts and largely unconstitutional by the courts. In the end, these programs do almost no perceptible good, and indeed, Levine and others argue, are actually harmful because they promote the mistaken notion that children are most at risk from predatory strangers and not, as statistics show, from family members and friends. 

Along with the harm these panics have caused, it is also vital to scrutinize the motives of the people who have propagated them. Bryant is now seen as a self-promoting lackey of the then emerging political Christian right wing. The most conservative members of the Meese Commission on pornography have all met fitting ends: Father Bruce Ritter of Covenant House was exposed as a hypocrite, a closeted but active homosexual who played fast and loose with public funds; Charles Keating, who was a key figure in the S&L scandals, laundered funds through his charitable, child protectionist organizations; Judianne Densen-Gerber was accused of embezzling public monies from Odyssey House, her drug- rehab center. For these people, protecting children seems to have been driven as much by personal gain as by altruism and civic concern. 

As Levine explains so convincingly in her book, many of those who have advocated for the “protection” of children over the past two-and-a-half decades have used the issue to advance political agendas that go way beyond preparing the next generation for adulthood. Such agendas have included controlling adults’—not just children’s —access to information about such matters as contraception, safe sex, and abortion; promoting heterosexual marriage as the only legal and moral place for sexual activity; and a full-fledged attack on all forms of gay and gender-expression rights. All these groups, including Concerned Women for America, the Family Research Council, American Family Association, and the National Law Center for Children and Families, constantly rail against the permissiveness of the 1960s, for the personal freedoms for women, people of color, homosexuals, and children secured during that decade are what they seek to undo. 

It is tempting to see this as a vast right-wing conspiracy. Levine takes exception to that charge. “This isn’t a conspiracy, but a strategy,” she says. “The right is using people’s legitimate anxieties around sexuality to fuel their own larger goals. The right, which is very well organized and often effective in its methods, is exploiting these fears. The terrible thing is that this will just make the situation worse. The shutdown of knowledge about sexuality will just make us, as a society, more anxious in the long run, and the denial of information to kids, such as safer-sex information, actually puts their lives at risk. They are, really, perpetrating harm to minors.” 

In the current political and social climate, the attack on Levine’s book makes complete sense. People do have real, and often not unreasonable, anxieties about how to raise their kids. As Levine and others point out, however, the situation does not get better by making the world scarier or by lying about what really happens out there. The reality is that children are more likely to be harmed or abused by people within the family circle, not by strangers. The reality is that sexual abuse of children is overwhelmingly heterosexual, not homosexual. The reality is that very little evidence suggests that children are hurt by sexual information—indeed, most evidence points to the fact that they are hurt by a lack of knowledge. The overwhelming evidence from studies at Columbia University and in the Journal of the American Medical Association shows that programs such as abstinence-only sex education and “chastity pledges” actually increase risks for pregnancy and HIV transmission. 

Almost all people have an urge to “protect” kids from things that are bad for them, but who gets to decide what is “bad?” For sincere, conservative, religious parents, “bad” might be any sexual contact outside of marriage, including masturbation and sexual fantasy. For liberal parents, “bad” might be children lacking information about safe sex and contraception. Part of the problem here is that many, many people disagree about what is “bad” for children. The other part of the problem is that social and religious conservatives often have a desire to enshrine in law and social policy their convictions about the immorality and danger of sexuality outside of monogamous, heterosexual marriage. From this perspective, there is no room for doubt (after all, it’s in the Bible), no room for disagreement (after all, the Bible is divine revelation), and no room for discussion (who can argue with God?). This winner-take-all view of sexual morality is what brings us to the messy battles we are in today. 

For Levine, as for many feminists and sexual liberationists, the right’s obsession with sex and its desire to legislate a strict, traditional sexual morality is, at heart, an attempt to reconstruct and reinforce a patriarchal worldview that has been crumbling over the past 50 years. Men are no longer on top, queers are no longer invisible, children have sexual needs and desires, and the world has been turned upside down. So much the better. But there are plenty of liberals and middle- of-the-roaders who share conservatives’ reservations. How many liberals had qualms about their nine-year-old daughters looking to Madonna (in her pre-motherhood days) as a role model? How many liberals want their teens to have access to information about contraception, but don’t really want them to have sex? How many heterosexual parents, even when they support gay rights, are upset when a daughter or son comes out? Indeed, for two decades, some feminists concerned about violence against women and the abuse of children have espoused policies dovetailing with conservatives’. 

Sex and desire are confusing to everybody a great deal of the time. We live in a culture that does not foster open and honest talk about sex. As a result, many people do one of two things: they either talk about the subject in shallow and unserious ways or, as with the religious right, they seek to impose on the world a simplistic moral schema. 

In Harmful to Minors, Levine tries to chart a third course: she talks to people about their experiences, examines scientific studies, analyzes statistics, looks into the history to see how we got here, and tries to figure out how to create a society that fulfills people’s sexual needs while being nurturing, loving, and supportive. No wonder she’s getting so much shit. 

When asked why she and her book have been targeted by the right, Levine was clear: “The germ of what is correct about the attacks on Harmful to Minors is that the right takes ideas seriously,” she says. “They are frustrated by what they see as academics throwing around ideas as if they had no consequence. The right understands that culture and images matter. That they can influence how people think and act. That is why I wrote the book: to show how bad ideas become practices—in psychology, education, the law, and parenting—and these bad ideas can have grave consequences in the real lives of children, families, and communities.” 

While only a short chapter in the book actually deals in part with intergenerational sex, it is that material that has been targeted as the most dangerous and it may make even liberal readers pause. “Legally designating a class of people categorically unable to consent to sexual relations is not the best way to protect children, particularly when ‘children’ includes everyone from birth to 18,” writes Levine. She sees as a model a 1990 Dutch law that “made sexual intercourse for people between 12 and 16 legal, but let them employ a statutory-consent age of 16 if they felt they were being coerced or exploited.” Parents can overrule the wishes of the child, but they have to make a good case to the Council for the Protection of Children. “What this law does is balance respect for minors as autonomous sexual beings with the recognition that minors can be exploited by adults. It respects kids, but it also protects them.” You might agree with this law or react vehemently against it. But the reality is that in the United States, even its proposal would be, as with so many sexual issues, undiscussable. 

The irony is that at a quick glance we are a culture obsessed with sex. But for all the endless parading of sexual fantasies in advertising and on television, the reality is that we don’t talk about sex very much. What would happen if we asked children and teens their thoughts about sex? What would happen if adults discussed honestly their sexual desires and experiences as children and adolescents? What would happen if some adults said that their experiences with teen sex were okay? What would happen if some adults said that their teen experiences with older partners were okay? 

At one point in her book, Levine says that one out of every five women who undergo abortion is an evangelical or born-again Christian. It is an amazing statistic because it brings to light the complexity of real lives. These women can’t be tossed aside or dismissed as cynical, self-serving hypocrites like Father Ritter and Judianne Densen-Gerber. Not having that child was as important to them as being “saved” by Jesus. Not only do they and their community have to deal with the complexity of this contradiction, but so do liberals, progressives, and feminists. 

Levine’s book is an invitation to public discussion and that is the real reason why it is being attacked by the right. It will be interesting to see if liberals and progressives can take up the challenge and genuinely discuss the issues she raises, or if they too are simply incapable of delving into the most terrifying sexual experience of all: talking openly and honestly about sexuality.                    Z