Marginalization
The claim about Rind, Elders, SIECUS, and me is not only that we have a political agenda, but that it is a radical one held by a small minority. Even sympathetic reporters played up this alleged eccentricity. «Their theories are explosive,» read the blurb of an even-handed piece in the LA Times. « A handful of maverick[s]...» Don Feder in the Boston Herald repeated the claim that sex educators, and I as their fellow traveler (see Guilt by Association), are libertines and hedonists: «Levine thinks we interfere with the primary mission of sex educators - teaching kids that whatever feels good by definition is good.» Actually, sex-ed has always been an eminently moderate project, since its inception teaching kids to wait until marriage. Moreover, in survey after survey, upwards of 80 percent of American parents say they want comprehensive sexuality education of the kind Feder decries.
Another rhetorical tactic is to quote something that would sound reasonable to most people and call it perverted. Among «Levine's bizarre theories» that Knight kept invoking was the «theory» that children are sexual from birth and, left to their own devices, will probably engage in masturbation and sex play. This «bizarre theory» is explicitly accepted by every reputable developmental psychologist and anthropologist in the industrialized world and implicitly by most everyone else in the world.
While the object of an attack is portrayed as a wild-eyed radical, the critics are described as reasonable, and legion. «In Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children From Sex, its author, Judith Levine, says parents should recognize their children as sexual beings and that in some instances, sex between adults and minors may actually be a good thing,» Greta Van Susteren introduced me on her show, misrepresenting the book. She added: «As you may expect this has parents around the country in a uproar.»
The «critics» also appear to be politically unaffiliated. In the New York Times , Knight was identified as a fellow of the Heritage Foundation, not as «the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank,» its own self-description. Only rarely in the scores of articles mentioning Concerned Women for America was the organization identified as it identifies itself: one that «seeks to instill Biblical principles in public policy at all levels.» During the time I was featured on CWA's home page, so was a campaign to halt the teaching of «the lie of evolution» in public schools and an indictment of the Bush Administration's «homosexual agenda,» evidenced by its hiring of a few members of the gay Log Cabin Republicans. Without such details, Concerned Women for America sounds moderate and matronly, another League of Women Voters.
The point of pushing someone to the margins is not only to discredit her in others' eyes, but to mobilize her own shame, even fear. And it works. Feeling despised as an outsider, one grasps at mainstream status.
Not married? I've been in a relationship for eleven years!
Have suspiciously short hair and don't wear skirts? My partner is a man!
No children? Wait, wait! I'm a doting aunt!
Sexual McCarthyism works with marginalization to discourage solidarity among the accused. In order to secure the credentials of normalcy, to remain in the safe precincts of what anthropologist Gayle Rubin describes as the «systems of sexual stigma,» the targeted person distances herself from those who are even further out on the edges. The sex education community, already reeling from the Right's pummeling, declined to come to my aid. Thus divided and conquered, it's not unusual for victims of an attack to blame each other, rather than the real source of their pain. One prominent sex educator wrote me, «You should think about the harm you've done to sexuality education by dragging us into your pedophile thing.»
But when called a pervert, one often goes further than not helping others accused of perversion. Ashamed, one wins respectability by expressing disgust for the «real» perverts. «What do you think of NAMBLA?» I was often asked. That's the North American Man Boy Love Association, an advocacy/support group for men with intergenerational sexual desires. «I think they're creeps,» I replied to one interviewer. But I am angry at myself for doing that. NAMBLA is a tiny, ineffectual group, exercising its right to free speech; it doesn't advocate criminal activity. Already utterly despised, NAMBLA's members don't need me trashing them, too.
Naming names of the «true» subversive gains the witness immunity from prosecution. This is how McCarthyism works—until, of course, someone names your name.
Anti-lntellectualism
« The road to hell is paved with academic studies,» wrote the Boston Herald's Feder. In the Right's demonology, «academics» are players at the seashore, tossing abstractions back and forth like beach balls, as if all ideas were light, happy, and harmless. A number of well-designed studies led me to find it «conceivable» that sex between a priest and a boy could be a positive experience for both, I told the syndicated reporter. Such data are a good place to start, I implied, because they are neutral and objective.
But if the wrong kind of sex at the wrong time inevitably wreaks unparalleled harm, as my critics contend, then such idle conceiving might itself be harmful, because it might weaken a crucially important social taboo and lead to more sexual abuse. This is the principle behind all censorship: that bad ideas lead to bad acts. To the Family Research Council, no datum is neutral. All are charged with moral freight. Knowledge is propaganda. Indeed, the indictment of both pornography and sexuality education is that they work as advertisements, users manuals for sex.
There is something to this argument. The Right understands that science and art are ideological. They know that ideas matter. Indeed, Gayle Rubin—hardly a Christian conservative—viewed Kinsey's neutrality toward everything we now call «queer» as a step toward tolerance of sexual difference; she praised him for it. Of course, tolerance of sexual difference is what the Right abhors. They call it «defining deviancy down.»
Lately, the Right has started to appropriate «science» to its own ends—for instance, changing the name of Christian creationism to «creation science» and circulating long-discredited studies that link abortion to breast cancer. Such tactics play on Americans' faith in scientific expertise. But Americans simultaneously worship and mistrust experts, especially outside the hard scientists. For many, the only unassailable expertise is gleaned from personal experience, and from emotion uninfected by reason.
Thus, the daytime TV talk shows always invite, as foils to the ivory-tower expert with the university press book, a «real person» - a parent, a teen, or best of all, a «victim.» This person is presumed to be a source of down-home wisdom and pain, as if the expert might not also be a parent or the victim of a painful experience.
m: 0cm; line-height: 0.45cm;">Here, from a monitoring service's synopsis of Fox's Good Day Live :
«Visual - Newsfile. Judith Levine argues that children of all ages are sexual beings. She says they should be free to seek out pleasure with consenting peers.
Jillian talks about this. She was molested as child. She wants to punch these people in the face. NAMBLA is a group that advocates sex between men and boys. Jillian is [a] huge Howard Stern fan. She flew American Airlines and loves the women on there.»
I don't mean to ridicule Jillian, whoever she is, but rather to point out the way in which her experience of abuse gives her authority, far more than someone like me, who only studies abuse.
Terror
Terrorists have replaced pedophiles in our nightmares as the inscrutable, obsessive, and endlessly proliferating cultists of perverse aggression. But the political psychology surrounding the two phenomena is similar. Repression cannot operate without fear. If there isn't enough danger, it must be exaggerated or invented. Yellow alert to red alert; predator to sexually violent predator—the boogeyman can be as scary as anyone wants him to be. As Harmful to Minors shows, how he becomes scary in the public imagination is a complex process, engaging the sometimes-antagonistic efforts of authoritarians and well-meaning healers, political ideologues and media sensationalists.
