January 26
Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex, Judith Levine (2002)

This is the book that made a big stink in the news when it was published a few years ago. I didn't know much about it, but I remember that a lot of religious conservatives wanted to have it banned and its publisher (the University of Minneota) punished. I couldn't recall the exact accusation but it was something to the effect that it was a liberal academic apologia for perversion and pedophilia.

A few weeks ago I happened to see the author on C-Span, serving on a panel discussing something in the general category of sexual sociology but not her book specifically. She caught my attention first with the splashy factoid that a man is likely to spend more time in prison for flashing a child than for murdering one, and then just by being generally interesting and intelligent. When they showed her name on the screen, identifying her as the author of Harmful to Minors, I thought, "Oh, she's the one who wrote that book", and I added the title to my list to request from the library. Unlike several of the other titles I've reserved (Krugman, O'Neill, MoneyBall...), it didn't have a zillion holds on it, so it came through right away.

The book is actually less radical than I expected. I was anticipating a scientific argument that looks bad out of context, perhaps pointing out that it's possible for a society to exist in which regular sexual relations between children and adults can be normalized in such a way that it is healthy for all involved (as was arguably the case in classical Greece), and thus the psychological damage it can cause in our current society is a result of the activity in combination with our social norms, as opposed to inherent in the activity itself.

But instead I found the book to be even more mainstream than that, not much different from what I'd expect to read from any number of pro-sex liberal sociologists. (Or perhaps I'm behind the times. In the 1970s there were dozens of those around. Can it really be true that they've all been driven into hiding by the Moral Majority?) The controversial premise, I gather, is the idea that such a thing as children's sexuality even exists. Once you accept that -- ie, that normal humans get pleasure from their genitals some time before puberty and that the transformation from child to adult is a gradual process rather than an instantaneous change on the eve of one's 18th birthday -- then everything else is just the interesting result of acknowledging that fact and exploring that concept further.

The way I see it, this book breaks down into three main sections. The first section, made up of the introduction plus a few early chapters, is a sweeping survey of the author's views about sex and society and how this one particular bit (ie, the idea that minors need to be protected from sex) is unhealthy. Next she gets into a bunch of nitty gritty statistics and anecdotes about all the really screwed-up things that have resulted from our bad cultural idea. Then the final section of the book is a bunch of policy recommendations for more effective sex education.

The first section is by far the best. In general, the book starts out with a whole lot of promise but then gets gradually less interesting the further it goes along. If you're one of those people who lacks either the time or the inclination to read many complete books, I offer the same advice as I do for Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae: Get the book and start reading it. Be sure to read the whole introduction, which is terrific. Keep going for a while longer until your interest starts to flag, then just quit and don't worry about the rest.

The second section is fascinating in a seamy sort of way. It's basically a litany of outrages conducted by our Justice Department in the name of child protection. It reminds me a lot of similar stories about the drug war, in which we throw ordinary, misguided but non-threatening losers into jail with far more enthusiasm than we do truly dangerous criminals.

Some of this was not new to me. I had heard about the outrageous prosecutions of daycare providers, all of whom turned out to be completely innocent. And I'd heard of the accusations of scatological satanic rituals which were so ludicrous that it's hard to imagine that anyone could take them seriously (and yet they did). What was new to me were stories of statutory rape prosecutions.

It turns out that in a great many cases the evil "sexual predator" you read about in the newspaper is just the dweeby 21-year-old boyfriend of a rebellious teenage girl. I have here on my desk a shopping coupon which came in the mailbox addressed to "Resident", featuring a photograph of a teenage girl with the caption "Have you seen me?" The advertisement, in the style of what we used to see on milk cartons, is sponsored by National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Looking at the statistics under the picture, I see that the girl's name is Amanda Berry, her date of birth is 4/22/1986, and the date she went missing is 4/21/2003. In other words, she disappeared one day before her 17th birthday

Now I know nothing of this case except what's here on the coupon, and it's possible that she's the victim of some grisly crime, in which case I apologize for using her as an example, but it seems to me that the far likelier explanation is that Miss Berry is a teenage runaway, not a missing or exploited child. And if she has indeed disappeared with a man, I'd guess that her departure is more likely an elopement than an abduction.

Whether it's the case with Miss Berry or not, there are certainly plenty of cases in which a 16-year-old girl and a 21-year-old boy fall in love and run off together. Forty years ago, the two would have just gotten married, and she may or may not have dropped out of school. Granted, that's not exactly a happy ending, and maybe it's worth trying to avoid, but the guy really isn't a "rapist" in the conventional sense of the word, nor is he a "child molester". And yet that's what they bust him as. Frequently.

The interesting lesson that comes out of all this -- stated explicitly by the author at one point, but communicated even more forcefully by all the anecdotes -- is that statutory rape laws exist to protect the rights of the parents, not the girl. If the girl is unwilling, it's rape rape, not statutory rape.

The problem, from society's point of view, is when the teenage girl wants to be with the guy, but her family doesn't want her to. Some poor man's sweet innocent daughter grows up and turns into a jezebel with a libido that drives her into the arms and the bed of some virile hunk of Temptation. Dad wants to stop her, to preserve her virtue, but she won't cooperate, so what can he do? He can call the sheriff and have the young man busted as a child molester, that's what. In all of these cases -- all of them -- the girl isn't the one who wants to prosecute, she doesn't think she's been victimized at all. Otherwise they wouldn't have to rely on statutory rape law.

In the book, this eventually becomes a metaphor for a larger theme. Just as our culture says that statutory rape laws are designed to protect children (ie, young women) when in fact they exist to assert society's rights over those children, so too do our leaders loudly and frequently proclaim that America loves its children more than anything when in fact our society doesn't treat children very well at all. But now I'm jumping ahead to the epilogue, which recapitulates the theme of the introduction.

Before that there is a concluding section made up of the author's recommendations about what sex education in America ought to be, with a few dashes of liberal activism sprinkled in here and there. One gets the impression that this is the book she really wanted to write, but she found herself needing to write all the preceding stuff by way of explanation of where she's coming from -- sort of like Wagner writing Siegfried, Walküre, and Rheingold just so that he can provide proper context to his story in Götterdämmerung. If you're someone who is interested in public policy and teaching children about sex -- as Karen is, come to think of it -- I suppose you might like this section (just as some people prefer Götterdämmerung to Walküre). Me, I found all the expository lead-up more interesting.

Perhaps it's because I grew up in a liberal culture in which this sort of talk was commonplace. Even though I myself never actually had sex as a teenager, I was raised to think that was normal and OK to do so, and it was only sensible that teenagers should want to pursue their sex lives in a way that would (1) minimize risk, and (2) maximize fun. For someone raised in a different culture, I suppose it might be revelatory and very helpful. It's all very good advice, and there are still some good points that I was happy to read, but on the whole it's more or less in the same vein as what I've read from any number of other pro-sex feminists (eg, Nancy Friday or Erica Jong, two of my personal favorites).

One of the exceptions, something that really caught my attention in this last part, was Levine's citation of statistics showing that a person is less likely to use protection (ie, a condom) when having sex in a loving, committed relationship. This holds true both for women and for gay men. Now, although it never occurred to me to think it through, on reflection this really isn't so surprising. After all, monogamous sex is safer sex, so they tell us, and an essential ingredient of love is trust. Part of the reward of being in a committed relationship is that you can let down your guard and not have to be so wary all the time, right?

Of course the problem is that in many cases (most cases, for the younger age group) the trust is misplaced. Maybe the guy has a past infection he doesn't tell you about, or doesn't himself know about. Or maybe he cheats on you. Either way, it's a risk of HIV transmission which wouldn't be there in a casual fling where you'd know to use a condom.

So the intriguing paradox is that what they tell you is wrong. The sex advisors are always saying that the safest sort of sex is sex in a loving, trusting relationship. But that rests on the assumption that the other person is honest and faithful. If he's not -- which, statistically, is more likely -- then the opposite is true. You're safer if you're out sleeping around and using a condom, rather than staying true (and unsafe) with the one guy who turns out to be a dog.

Another eye-opener: In those studies you see cited in the newspaper which report on the number of teens who are sexually active, "sexually active" doesn't necessarily mean what you think it does. In many studies, Levine points out, it is defined as anyone who has had sex at all. So if some 15-year-old is lucky enough to get laid at summer camp, and then returns to high school and never does it again until senior prom, during those two intervening years he was "sexually active", even though he really wasn't active at all.

Quotidian. This isn't actually a new word for me, since I've seen it in Bill Buckley, and I'm fairly certain that it turned up not too long ago in a newsgroup I read. (I thought it was G/P Dave in RMO, but a Google Groups search turns up nothing.) Even so, it tickled my fancy to read about the "quotidian sexual lives" of teenagers. Ooh, that sounds so naughty.

Hebophile. This doesn't turn up in any of my dictionaries, so I don't know how recent a coinage it is. The root of the first half of the word is not a slang ethnic term, but rather the classical Greek Hebe (pronounced "hee-bee"), among whose titles was goddess of youth. Thus, a hebophile is not one who is sexually aroused by Jews, but rather by teenagers. (Several ideas in my head for what the former might be called, but they all involve ethnic slurs, so I guess I'd better refrain....)

Under current American social standards, and much of American law, Ms Levine notes, hebophiles are grouped into the same category as pedophiles. This is a rather odd convention given how patently obvious is the difference between a guy who is turned on by a naked eight-year-old girl and one who is turned on by a naked 16-year-old girl. I'm not sure where one draws the semantic line between pedo and hebo, but if we're looking at the upper end of teenagerdom -- say, from 15 to 17 -- I think a solid majority of heterosexual men would surely fall into the category of hebophile. When a man sees a 17-year-old in a bikini, chances are she looks hot to him. It doesn't mean he's going to have sex with her, not even in the unlikely event that he's single and she's interested -- but she still looks sexy. That is hebophilia.

In our upside-down society it's now considered pedophilia as well. If a man has sex with a 17-year-old girl, even if she is a willing participant and not in any familial or other authority relationship with him, he is technically a child molester, which means he's some kind of vile pervert. To me, that is ludicrous, and I think I speak for a lot of heterosexual men when I say this. If I hear about a guy who has sex with a 17-year-old and ends up in jail, my thought is, "Oh man, what were you thinking? You shouldn't have done that. Now you're gonna be sorry." I don't, however, think, "Ooh, ick, that's gross. Why would anyone want to fuck a 17-year-old?" Does any straight man think that? I doubt it.

Uh oh. Does this mean my blog will now be banned from computers used in schools and public libraries?

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