Afterword
A month before the April 2002 publication of Harmful to Minors, in the middle of the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandal, I received a call from a reporter for a syndicated news service. His story focused on academics who were questioning the orthodoxy that every sexual experience between a minor and an adult is unwanted by the former, traumatic, and permanently damaging. A friend had referred the reporter to me, thinking that my academic-press book could use a little free publicity.
Although I began by informing the reporter that only a small portion of my book is about sex between adults and minors, I told him I agreed with researchers who believe the term “abuse” had become so broad as to be virtually useless. Fortunately, research was creating a more nuanced picture of the “victims” and their experiences; for instance, it was making distinctions between being raped nightly by a father and groped once by a stranger at the pool. Even the same act does not feel the same to everyone, I said. Some children or teens are traumatized, others unmoved, and some say they initiated the sex and enjoyed it.
“Could a priest and a boy conceivably have a positive sexual experience together?” the reporter asked.
“Conceivably? Absolutely it’s conceivable,” I answered, “because the data tell us that some kids report such relationships as positive.” I cited a large meta-analysis of the abuse literature by Temple University psychologist Bruce Rind and two colleagues, published in the Psychological Bulletin of the American Psychological Association, which found that not all minor-adult sex is traumatic at the time nor leads to long-term harm; boys were likely to call the experiences neutral or positive, girls negative or abusive. The researchers stressed that their work was not meant to exonerate anyone. Rather, they hoped that isolating the factors that render such sexual events painful for the child or troubling long into adulthood could help in tailoring more effective therapies.
I knew I was treading on dangerous turf when I praised Rind. In 1997, he was the target of conservative radio talk show host “Dr.” Laura Schlesinger and Judith Reisman, a prominent right-wing activist against pornography, sex education, and sex research, who has made a career of discrediting pioneer sexologist Alfred Kinsey. An anti-homosexual group had objected to Rind’s study and gotten in touch with Dr. Laura. She denounced him repeatedly on the air as an apologist for pedophilia and soon was joined by a coalition of Christian conservative organizations. They in turn found support from a group of therapists who specialize in the aftereffects of sexual abuse and whose work is based on the axiom that all child-adult sex leads to adult psychopathology; more controversially, many also believe that a troubled patient is likely to have sexual abuse in her past, even if she doesn’t remember it and therefore needs the therapist’s help in “recovering memories.” Dr. Laura and her friends eventually persuaded Congress to censure the APA for publishing work that suggested sexual abuse was not always harmful. Rather than defend its scientific peer-review process, the APA issued a mea culpa and vowed to vet politically sensitive material more carefully in the future. Dr. Laura’s victorious legions looked for other infidels to subdue.
They found me. A few days after the interview with the syndicate’s reporter, his story ran in the Web edition of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, my publisher’s hometown paper, under the headline, “University of Minnesota Press Book Challenges Demonization of Pedophilia.” I was quoted this way: “[Levine] said the pedophilia among Roman Catholic priests is complicated to analyze, because it’s almost always secret, considered forbidden and involves an authority figure. She added, however, that, ‘yes, conceivably, absolutely’ a boy’s sexual experience with a priest could be positive.”
Although Harmful to Minors discusses pedophiles hardly at all, overnight I became the author of “the pedophilia book.” Although the book doesn’t condone, much less promote, child molesting, that was suddenly its reputation.
Within days, the University of Minnesota Press was inundated with calls. Half were demanding that the press’s management resign and Harmful to Minors—and maybe its author—be burned. The rest were from producers from talk shows. My publicist in New York was playing off requests from The Today Show against Good Morning America and Fox’s Greta Van Susteren. The AM-radio shock jocks were the most numerous and persistent. “My host is very fair, very intelligent,” one from Los Angeles told me. With the sensitivity of an eagle a mile downwind of a field mouse, he could sniff his prey through the phone line. When he realized he was stalking an egghead, he added, “She’s an NPR type.”
She wasn’t.
“So, Judith, do you have any children?” the host asked, a few minutes into the interview.
“No, no children.” I confessed, followed by a petition for indulgence: “I have a niece and nephew.”
“Do you touch your niece and nephew?”
“Of course I touch them.”
“And how do you touch them?”
I could feel where this was going, but was powerless to escape. “I hug and kiss them, I stroke their hair, I rub their backs.”
“And at what age would you say it was appropriate to start touching your niece and nephew in order to initiate them into sex?”
I gulped, then declared, “Never, never!” But it sounded feeble. She’d already asked me when I stopped beating my wife.
I hung up the phone and dialed my publicist, Katie. “Tell the next person who calls that Judith is unavailable,” I said. “It’s the second night of Passover, and she’s out eating Christian children.”
A few minutes later, a friend phoned in from her car: “Hey Judith! I just heard Dr. Laura denouncing you on the radio. Congratulations!”
So, Dr. Laura was the force behind my sudden fame. I’d soon learn that she had been alerted by Judith Reisman, who also called Robert Knight, with whom she’d worked at the Christian-conservative Family Research Council. He was now at a sister organization, Concerned Women for America. In the mid-1990s, CWA had run a massive campaign against America’s flagship advocate of mainstream comprehensive sexuality education, the Sex Information & Education Council of the U.S., generating 30,000 letters to Congress calling SIECUS and its sex-ed guides “blatant promoters of promiscuity, pornography, abortion, pedophilia, and incest.” Now Dr. Laura had uncovered another member of “the pro-pedophile lobby.”
I started to weep. It was late, but I called Katie again. My voice was little: “I’m cooked.”
Katie answered with the un-flak-like candor I would grow to love. “You’re right. It’s pretty bad.” She put me on hold to decline several invitations from other AM talk-radio shows. When she returned, she’d regained her professional pluck. “Don’t worry,” she said. “We’ll spin it.”
The good news was the book would get tons of publicity. Within the next two months, it was covered by scores of media outlets, from the Lancaster, PA, New Era to the New York Times, the gay and lesbian out.com to the neo-Nazi Jeff’s Archives, WNBC Radio to college stations in rural Wisconsin. The bad news was that most of the publicity was about a book I didn’t write.
Never mind what Harmful to Minors is about, though. Most of my critics didn’t read it. And even those who did, and took it seriously, felt obliged to lead their stories with the allegation that it was an apologia for sexual abuse, “the most controversial book of the year.” Spending up to 12 hours a day being interviewed, I just could not spin the story back to sanity.
In these stories, my “critics” got equal time. These were always the same few. Knight led the charge. Although he hadn’t read the book, he pronounced it an “evil tome.” Reisman made more secular, if no less satanic, associations. She had not read the book either, she told one major daily, but she didn’t have to. She averred that she hadn’t read Mein Kampf and she knew what was in it. I thought of writing a letter to the editor noting a small evidentiary difference between that book’s author and myself: I had not yet invaded Poland.
As in the Rind attack, politicians got into the act. Republican House Majority Leader Tom DeLay introduced a resolution calling on former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders to remove her preface from the book (unsurprisingly, Dr. Elders felt no inclination to oblige the conservative members of Congress). A New York City Councilman from Queens introduced his own resolution denouncing the book. But it was local politicians in the Press’s home state who had the greatest effect and reaped the greatest benefit. Minnesota House Majority Leader Tim Pawlenty, who was also vying for the GOP’s gubernatorial nomination, condemned Harmful to Minors as “disgusting,” and “an endorsement of child molestation.” He got more than 50 legislators to demand that the University suppress the book’s publication. With alerts on the Christian Right Web sites, hundreds of e-mails and calls poured into the Press’s office supporting this demand. None of these people had read the book, which was not yet available. When a protest at the university president’s house drew only a few participants, its organizer, the lone member of his own political party, undertook a hunger strike (reliable sources observed him drinking a canned protein shake, after which I called him my dieting striker).
For some of my attackers, though, ordinary political activism did not suffice. In the heat of that cool spring month, I received a death threat. A university policewoman told me that her colleagues were doing all they could to track down the owner of the hotmail account. But the writer was too far away and appeared too disorganized to carry out any promises. His missive, originating in the aptly named Escondido, California, was addressed to “that woman who wrote the book” and e-mailed in care of the Press. Not to fret, the officer assured me. This was a “benign death threat.”
In the end, the University administration yielded to the legislature’s pressure and instituted an outside review of the University of Minnesota Press’s editorial practices. The review was more than vindicating: UMP’s standards were found to equal those at other university presses and in some instances were deemed “more rigorous than most.” But the effects of the attack are likely to linger anyway. Just as the American Psychological Association’s surrender emboldened Bruce Rind’s attackers to go after me, the University of Minnesota’s acquiescence in my case is likely to encourage other smear campaigns and censorship threats.1 Commercial publishers, who shied away from the book on the first round, will only be more squeamish about similarly controversial titles. The Christian conservative organizations, whose public profiles had lately flattened, enjoyed a momentary spike of attention. And Tim Pawlenty’s career soared. He was elected governor of Minnesota in 2002, from which office he is overseeing massive cuts to the state’s higher-education budget.
When asked to explain the “firestorm of controversy” (as everyone called it) around Harmful to Minors, I always answered that the book was about the American hysteria over children’s sexuality and this attack was an example of the same hysteria.
But hysteria is the wrong word. Hysteria—irrational fear, panic, exaggerated rage—surely moved many of the letter-writers and my would-be assassin. But hysteria implies something more anarchic and unconsciously motivated than what happened to me, or to Rind or SIECUS, or before us to sex researchers, educators, and advocates from Margaret Sanger to Alfred Kinsey to Joycelyn Elders— indeed, from the original modern proponent of “normalizing” children’s sexuality, Sigmund Freud, to the public school teacher who utters the word clitoris in a seventh-grade classroom.
What happened to us all was more deliberate, orchestrated, and sophisticated than hysteria. We were the targets of a campaign prosecuted by sexual ideologues and political opportunists for whom the incitement of hysteria is only one tactic. I knew the histories of these campaigns—Harmful to Minors tells them. But every book publication teaches the author something she didn’t learn in writing the book. My lesson, as the object of what I’d written about, was an intimate knowledge of the way anti-sex campaigns work.
Distortion
Here’s how Sean Hannity of Fox News’ TV mudslinger Hannity & Colmes quoted Harmful to Minors: “We relish our erotic attraction to children.”
This is what Harmful to Minors says: “We relish our erotic attraction to children, says [literary critic James] Kincaid. ... But we also find that attraction abhorrent.” Not only does the book extensively discuss this contradiction, I was quoting somebody else.
In a petition for the suppression of Harmful to Minors to Minnesota’s then-governor, Jesse Ventura, Jim Hughes of Survivors And Victims Empowered (SAVE) wrote: “Levine’s previous work provides us a clue to her pro-pedophile thinking...She describes men this way: Men’s sexuality is mean and violent, and men so powerful that they can ‘reach WITHIN women to...construct us from the inside out.’ Satan-like, men possess women, making their wicked fantasies and desires women’s own. A woman who has sex with a man therefore, does so against her will, ‘even if she does not feel forced.’ ”
Actually, this passage, from my first book, My Enemy, My Love, is a quotation from someone else too. The characterization of men’s sexuality comes from the propaganda of a group called Women Against Sex, which I describe as representing “the most extreme edge of an already marginal politics.” I also call them “nutty.”
Selective quotation, exaggeration, and outright lies are time-honored tactics of the Right. Judith Reisman has long circulated the calumny that Alfred Kinsey conducted sexual experiments on infants at his institute; she offers no substantiation. Focus on the Family routinely refers to sex-ed curricula as “pornography.” For decades, sex-ed opponents have broadcast rumors of teachers disrobing in the classroom and children molding genitals out of clay. In Talk About Sex, sociologist Janice M. Irvine calls these “depravity narratives,” tales that strain credibility one by one, but in great enough numbers stir suspicion that something like them must be true. Would I actually molest my niece and nephew? A listener might dismiss that insinuation as too extreme. But a person like me who wrote a book like that might do something almost as bad—such as condoning molestation.
In the past, such stories were reproduced in right-wing publications and at public meetings, on radio and television. The Internet only multiplies the speed and reach of this dissemination. By June, 2002, a Google search for the term “Judith Levine abuse” yielded more than 7,400 matches, most resembling the second one on the screen: “BOUNDLESS — EXCUSING CHILD ABUSE...One of the apostles of this movement, Judith Levine...”
In an already combustible atmosphere of sexual panic, distortions and lies raise the temperature and throw in the match. Voilà, a “firestorm of controversy.”
Guilt by Association, or Sexual McCarthyism
The charge against me was not only that I am an advocate of pedophilia, but that I am part of an organized and increasingly influential “pro-pedophile lobby,” whose aim is “normalizing” child abuse. One clue to my membership was that citation of Bruce Rind. Another was the author of the book’s foreword, Joycelyn Elders. You may remember Elders’ pro-pedophilic crime. She told an audience of sex educators that masturbation would be an appropriate topic of sex-ed classroom discussion; this inspired the Republican House of Representatives in 1994 to demand her resignation. Knight, on Concerned Women’s Web site, described the events this way: “Elders was fired by Bill Clinton shortly after she began a campaign to teach children to masturbate.”
The pro-pedophile lobby allegedly has been around for a long time. In a U.S. News & World Report column rebuking me, John Leo recalled his own prescience in uncovering the conspiracy. “Back in 1981, an astute writer at Time magazine (that would be me) noticed that pro-pedophilia arguments were catching on among some sex researchers and counselors, [psychologist] Larry Constantine, [sex researchers] Wardell Pomeroy, and Alfred Kinsey,” he wrote, leading up to my own connections to the lobby. “Harmful to Minors has a foreword by former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, so don’t say you weren’t warned.” Washington Times writer Robert Stacy McCain contributed a catalogue of my “pedophile sources” to the Web site of Concerned Women. “Yes, Virginia,” he wrote. “There is a pedophile movement, and Judith Levine’s book is part of it.”
But pedophiles and their lobbyists were not bad enough for some, so worse co-conspirators were proposed. While Reisman linked me to Hitler, a NewsCorridor columnist named Gregory J. Hand located me at the other end of the political spectrum, as a “bisexual Marxist Jewess,” apparently part of the international Jewish conspiracy that not only controls the banks and the press, but also is “promoting adult-child sex.” McCain’s Concerned Women piece offered this bit of commentary: “A Google search reveals that [Levine] has described herself as a ‘red-diaper baby’—that is, the child of Communist Party activists—and a socialist herself, who has written that she is ‘allergic to religion.’ Very interesting, but not a word of it in the New York Times or USA Today.” This revelation, along with the writer’s insinuation that the press was covering it up, evoked a charming bit of nostalgia. The John Birch Society and Christian Crusade in the 1960s called the Republican Quaker founding president of SIECUS, Mary Calderone, and her colleagues “atheists” and “one-worlders,” a code word for communists. They also frequently pointed out how many sex educators and sexologists were Jews (who were also suspected of traitorous sentiments) and declared that together these people were softening up America’s youth for conversion by the godless Reds. When the “red-diaper” comment came up at the end of a long phone interview, I broke the news to McCain: “I hate to tell you, Rob, but the Communist Party’s position on sex was about as progressive as the Catholic Church’s.”
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.
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.
Sexual peril is real, just as terrorism is real. But the kind of “protection” that is mobilized by fear, the kind that purports to keep the young safe by locking them in their rooms, ignorant and scared to death—policies like abstinence-only education—will not protect them. Like the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act, such policies offer only illusory security, because they do nothing to stop the wellsprings of danger. Ironically or intentionally, those wellsprings are the very ignorance and terror we’re instilling in kids, whereas the means of their self-defense are knowledge and courage, as well as rights and respect, political and sexual citizenship.
Such “security” imperils something else we cannot afford to destroy: freedom. For in sex or in democracy, freedom is not a luxury; it is constitutive. We need to balance respect for young people’s sexual freedom with adults’ obligation to protect them. In dangerous times, we must discern which dangers threaten us for real, in the form of a virus, a rapist, or a flaming jetliner, and which are of our own making.

1 As I write, the Kansas State Senate has voted to cut $3 million from the state university budget unless the school ceases to purchase “obscene” materials used in a popular sexuality education class, such as slides of naked five- and ten-year-old girls.