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Jody
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Sex Industry would be batter |
Two new books have been
published since 9/11 which demonstrate sanity and courage by
American authors. In both cases, the publishers held the books
back before finally releasing the as written by the authors.
Michael Moore's Stupid White
Men has become an instant best seller, despite not being
reviewed by any of the major media in the U.S. Judith Levine's
book has been misrepresented by the religious right as advocating
sex between children and adults. Of course, Levine does no such
thing. She illuminates a problem which is very much in the news
as Cardinals are being called to the Vatican to account for themselves
in taking advantage of their positions to molest innocent children.
That problem came to light because people talked about it.
Judith Levine:
Brave author
The Taboos of Touch
Debbie Nathan, AlterNet
April 18, 2002
A new book from University
of Minnesota Press has just hit the stores. But weeks before
it was available to the public, "Harmful to Minors: The
Perils of Protecting Children from Sex," had already provoked
a rash of national press. The media is responding to what can
only be called the usual suspects -- a posse of moral conservatives
and practitioners of discredited therapy who've been wreaking
havoc lately on scientific research and academic freedom.
They claim they're outraged
that the book promotes "pedophilia." The critics' real
goal, though, is not to protect children. The right-wingers are
pushing a fundamentalist attack on mainstream American institutions
such as legal abortion; acceptance of gays as normal people,
and sex education in public schools.
I was on the committee the
University of Minnesota Press asked to review "Harmful to
Minors" suitability for publication. Written by journalist
and feminist Judith Levine, the book asks the adults of America
to put aside irrational fears about children's sexuality, and
to help our kids grow up safe and happy by giving them the information
they need to make wise decisions about their sex lives. The best
research shows they'll have those sex lives anyway. Levine argues
that it makes sense then, to arm them with knowledge and resources
to avoid unwanted pregnancy, AIDS, sex abuse, shame, and other
miseries; teach them to enjoy their bodies and their desires;
and to take comfort in the fact that though sexual abuse is morally
wrong, it does not necessarily destroy a child's psyche.
As someone who has written
about sex abuse panics and who has spent the last few years raising
a teenaged son and daughter, I was struck by how smart the book
is. Particularly impressive is Levine's use of social science
research to buttress her arguments. Topics such as the need for
comprehensive sex ed and accessible abortion are the meat of
"Harmful to Minors," and take up the bulk of the book.
A discussion about sex between adolescents and adults occupies
one chapter. It suggests the need to rethink America's statutory
rape laws, which are inconsistent from state to state, and based
on antediluvian tenets about preserving girls' virginity, instead
of rational concepts like gender equality and child welfare.
Again, this brief section is buttressed with solid research data.
Even so, the idea of teen-adult
sex gives most American parents the willies. Right-wing fundamentalists
and discredited therapists are now using this anxiety as a Trojan
horse to attack science and the academy.
The American Psychological
Association was the first victim. In 1998, Temple University
social psychologist Bruce Rind and colleagues published in the
APA's prestigious Psychological Bulletin. Analyzing some five
dozen previous studies, the researchers concluded that not all
minors who have sexual experiences with adults seem traumatized;
in fact, many -- particularly males -- describe their experience
as benign, even positive. The article was spotted by the National
Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, which
believes that homosexuals can and should stop being gay. NARTH
spread the word about the study. Soon radio talk show hostess
"Dr. Laura" Schlessinger was on the case.
Two years ago, Schlessinger
provoked national outrage when she condemned gays as the "deviant"
product of "biological error." Today her website collects
money for crisis pregnancy centers -- hotbeds of anti-choice
organizing. Shlessinger denounced the Rind study repeatedly on
her show as dangerous pseudoscience generated by pedophile sympathizers.
The APA was deluged with angry calls and hundreds of thousands
of form letters. Politicians got them too. At the behest of ultra-conservative
Republican Whip Tom DeLay, Congress passed a unanimous resolution
censuring the study. This was apparently the first time in history
that the federal legislature ever condemned a scientific work
because it disliked the findings.
Faced with possible cuts in
government funds for mental health projects, the APA went into
a tailspin. The group wrote DeLay, apologizing for publishing
the study without considering the "public policy" implications,
and vowing something unprecented: to have it peer-reviewed again.
Three years later, many APA members are still disturbed at how
their organization caved under government pressure. Some have
left the group for this reason. The APA's public affairs director
told the Boston Globe that the flap will have "a chilling
effect" on future research about children and sex.
Now, "Harmful to Minors"
and the University of Minnesota Press are getting the same treatment.
Besides Dr. Laura, the main rabble-rousers are Concerned Women
for America and an individual named Judith Reisman. CWA, which
calls for a return to Bible-based morality, was founded two decades
ago to fight the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. The group
calls for an end to sex education in schools and describes homosexuality
as "a plague." In the 1980s, CWA provided money and
legal counsel for a lawsuit to remove textbooks from a public
school system in Tennessee. The reason: the texts promoted "secular
humanism" with material like The Wizard of Oz and "Goldilocks
and the Three Bears."
Reisman, a former researcher
for Rev. Donald Wildmon's ultra-conservative American Family
Foundation, received $734,000 from the Justice Department's 1980s-era
"Meese" anti-pornography commission to study cartoons
of children in men's magazines. When she handed in her work,
the government refused to publish it because it was so flawed.
In 1990, she was the only citizen, except for several police
officers, to testify for the state of Ohio in its obscenity case
against a Cincinnati museum that had exhibited the work of famed
gay photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
Reisman told the jury Mapplethorpe
was a "fascist" whose pictures were "not art"
because they seldom depicted faces. (The jury acquitted.) Since
then, Reisman has published her major work with Lousiana-based
Huntington House. According to its website, the press specializes
in titles such as "From Earthquakes to Global Unity: The
End Times Have Begun," and books that ask "Are we under
siege from ancient demonic powers?"
Reisman has gone on record
comparing "Harmful to Minors" with "Mein Kampf"
(though she admits she's read neither book). After she conveyed
these thoughts to Concerned Women for America, that group mounted
a mega-letter-writing campaign against the book. In response,
the Minnesota's House Majority Leader, a Republican, has called
Harmful to Minors "debased" and told the University
of Minnesota Press to "punish" its director for publishing
it.
This is no idle threat. Recently,
the head of the political science department at the University
of Missouri in Kansas City was vilified on talk radio for publishing
an article pointing out that sex between men and boys is common
and permissible in many cultures, and has been so during many
periods in history. In retaliation, the state legislature yanked
$100,000 from the university budget.
Reisman and right-wing groups
such as CWA have lately been joined in their attack by a group
of psychotherapists whose background is unknown to most of the
press. The Leadership Council for Mental Health, Justice, and
the Media was organized in the late 1990s. The organization was
a backlash response to national outcry over bad therapy that
was creating "recovered" false memories of child sex
abuse. The Leadership Council's own leaders are "dissociationists"
-- they work with patients who used to be called multiple personalities,
a la the legendary "Sybil."
These therapists claim the
illness is virtually always caused by severe child sex abuse.
But that claim has never been proven, and dissociation has become
so controversial that "multiple personality disorder"
was dumped a few years ago from the American Psychiatric Associatiion's
official list of mental illnesses. Many psychologists now think
it's "caused" by bad therapy (and by bad afternoon
shock-talk shows).
Leadership Council officers,
however, were this country's biggest proponents of multiple personality
disorder during the 1980s. And because many of their patients
told stories of satanic ritual abuse, the credulous dissociation
therapists promoted a national hysteria over apocryphal devil-worshipping
child molesters, including in daycare centers. They attacked
the Psychological Bulletin study after it came out in 1998. Now
they're after "Harmful to Minors," no doubt because
it suggests that not all children are psychologically ravaged
by sex abuse, or in need of lifetime therapy.
The University of Minnesota
is now trying to mollify all these attackers by ordering an "external
review" of how the University of Minnesota Press chooses
books for publication. The university vice president who oversees
the press says she can't imagine reviewers' recommendations will
undermine academic freedom. She could be right. Still, the very
fact that there was a review in the first place is bound to chill
academic presses all over the country when they deal in the future
with controversial books. It seems incredible that decisions
about what constitutes science and scholarship -- not to mention
mainstream American values -- are being dictated by Bible-thumpers,
talk-show martinets and proponents of questionable therapy.
Debbie Nathan is a New York-based
writer and the co-author, with Michael Snedeker, of Satan's Silence:
Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt.
Storm erupts over book
lauding youthful sexuality
By JOHN IBBITSON Globe and
Mail, Saturday, April 20, 2002
Washington - Even as the United
States is gripped by the unfolding scandal of pedophilia within
the Roman Catholic Church, a controversial new book has hit the
stands, arguing that what society calls sexual abuse may simply
be the healthy expression of youthful sexuality.
This month's publication of
Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex
by journalist Judith Levine has caused a furor not only on talk
shows, but within the publishing and academic industries.
Pressed by legislators, the
University of Minnesota is reviewing the acquisition policies
of its press.
"The University of Minnesota
should admit its mistake and scrap the book," said Robert
Knight, director of Concerned Women of America's Child and Family
Institute.
"Miss Levine is advocating
criminal sexual activity with children," he said.
The university published the
book after it was rejected by several other houses.
For the author, such criticism
proves her thesis: that North American society, gripped by political
and social conservatism, has created a fictional monster of pedophilia
in an effort to control and suppress young people's freedom.
"It is the triumph of
the right, and it is an immense triumph," she said yesterday
in an interview. "The combination of the rise of the moral
right and, in this country at least, the dismantling of many
of the institutions and supports that make family life easier
- good schools, good housing, health care and so on - leave parents
feeling very insecure, and then we attach those anxieties to
sexuality."
There is no denying that many
of Ms. Levine's contentions are highly controversial.
"Sex is not ipso facto
harmful to minors," she states in her book, "and America's
drive to protect kids from sex is protecting them from nothing.
Instead, often it is harming them."
The hypocrisy is what galls
her. Society, through film, television, advertising and the like,
exalts teenage sexuality, then makes any action on that sexuality,
by adults or teens themselves, illegal and immoral.
Ms. Levine also contends that
true pedophilia, a desire by adults to engage in sex with prepubescent
children, is extremely rare, and the fear of it is used by the
state and parents to restrict freedom and independence of the
young.
But many others consider Ms.
Levine's assertions wrong, even dangerous. The Minnesota state
legislature majority leader Tim Pawlenty tried to force the University
of Minnesota to cancel the book. And editorials and columns in
newspapers from Oregon to Washington have condemned the decision
to publish the text.
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