Tuesday, April 16, 2002

Children, Sexuality and Censorship

The University of Minnesota Press is poised to release a very controversial book this month. The calls for censorship have been loud and vociferous.

The topic is touchy, very touchy.

In Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex, Judith Levine looks at children and sexuality in our culture.

UMinnPress has a book overview, two excerpts from the text, and a Q and A with Levine posted.

In the excerpts, Levine argues that the public has an irrational fear of pedophilia, and that censoring children from sexual content does not protect them.

So here are some select bits:

The problem with all this information about pedophiles is that most of it is not true or is so qualified as to be useless as generalization. First of all, the streets and computer chat rooms are not crawling with child molesters, kidnappers, and murderers. According to police files, 95 percent of allegedly abducted children turn out to be "runaways and throwaways" from home or kids snatched by one of their own parents in divorce custody disputes.

Studies commissioned under the Missing Children's Assistance Act of 1984 estimate that between 52 and 158 children will be abducted and murdered by nonfamily members each year. Extrapolating from other FBI statistics, those odds come out between 1 in 364,000 and fewer than 1 in 1 million. A child's risk of dying in a car accident is twenty-five to seventy-five times greater.

Hmmm... sort of like my chances of getting married again are supposedly lower than my chances of being killed by a terrorist. I do so love statistics.

Our culture fears the pedophile, say some social critics, not because he is a deviant, but because he is ordinary. And I don't mean because he is the ice-cream man or Father Patrick. No, we fear him because he is us.

In his elegant study of "the culture of child-molesting," the literary critic James Kincaid traced this terror back to the middle of the nineteenth century. Then, he said, Anglo-American culture conjured childhood innocence, defining it as a desireless subjectivity, at the same time as it constructed a new ideal of the sexually desirable object. The two had identical attributes — softness, cuteness, docility, passivity — and this simultaneous cultural invention has presented us with a wicked psychosocial problem ever since.

There is something strange and icky about "the culture of child-molesting" and "elegant" being in the same sentence.

We relish our erotic attraction to children, says Kincaid (witness the child beauty pageants in which JonBenét Ramsey was entered). But we also find that attraction abhorrent (witness the public shock and disgust at JonBenét's "sexualization" in those pageants). So we project that eroticized desire outward, creating a monster to hate, hunt down, and punish.

Herman's work was at the front edge of a horrifying suspicion, the truth of which is now firmly established. Even if child-sex crimes against strangers are rare, incest is not.

Bonus points here for Levine. Although I do not see much of a difference between a pedophile and incest. Just because the person raping the child is a relative, I don't think the act is not pedophilia.

Psychologists and law enforcers call the man who loves teenagers a hebophile. That's a psychiatric term, denoting pathological sexual deviance. But if we were to diagnose every American man for whom Miss (or Mr.) Teenage America was the optimal sex object, we'd have to call ourselves a nation of perverts.

If the teenage body were not the culture's ideal of sexiness, junior high school girls probably would not start starving themselves as soon as they notice a secondary sex characteristic, and the leading lady (on-screen or in life) would not customarily be twenty to forty years younger than the leading man.

Think that skeezy flick 6 Days, 7 Nights with Anne Heche and Harrison Ford or the equally skeezy Entrapment with Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones. (EEEWWWWW, yuckie)

I asked Meg Kaplan, a widely respected clinician who treats sex offenders at the New York State Psychiatric Institute's Sexual Behavior Clinic, about the medicalization and criminalization of the taste for adolescent flesh. "Show me a heterosexual male who's not attracted to teenagers," she snorted. "Puh-leeze."

On to censorship -- which is rampant in our free society:

The cultural historian Michel Foucault said that sex is policed not by silence but by endless speech, by the "deployment" of more and more "discourses" of social regulation— psychology, medicine, pedagogy. But our era, while producing plenty of regulatory chatter from on high, has also seen an explosion of unofficial, anarchic, and much more exciting discourses down below.

When the sexual revolution collided with the boom in media technologies, media sex mushroomed. We started collecting statistics to prove it: 6.6 sexual incidents per hour on top-rated soap operas (half that number ten years before); fourteen thousand sexual references and innuendos on television annually (compared with almost none when Ozzie and Harriet slept in twin beds); movies most popular with teenagers "contain[ing] as many as fifteen instances of sexual intercourse in less than two hours" (Gone with the Wind had one, off-screen).

Nobody lives more in the "hypermediated" environment than the young. At the end of the twentieth century, a quarter of kids had their own televisions by the time they were five years old. It was no use telling them to go outside and get a "real" life. Why play sandlot baseball when you can pitch to Sammy Sosa from a virtual mound? Even technologized sexual speech no longer just stands for sex; it is sex.

Sherry Turkle, a social analyst of computer communication at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, described the on-screen erotic exchanges that Netizens call "tinysex": "A 13-year-old informs me that she prefers to do her sexual experimentation online. Her partners are usually the boys in her class at school. In person, she says, it is 'mostly grope-y.' Online, 'they need to talk more.'"

(SNICKER) Out of the mouths of babes. Men need to talk more -- indeed!

Where do you learn about sex? a television interviewer asked a fifteen-year-old from a small rural town. "We have 882 channels," the girl replied.

Too funny. I predict the University of Minnesota Press has a run away best seller on their hands... Not published yet, it is already #85 at Amazon, although they will probably ship it in a plain wrapper.

Watch the FBI will attempt to access the sales records -- all of course, to better build a data base on potential pedophile offenders.

posted by Bohica at 10:40 AM