Innocent Pleasures? Children and Sexual Politics

Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex. Judith Levine. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. xxxv + 299 pp.

Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting. James R. Kincaid. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. xii + 352 pp.

Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America. Philip Jenkins. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. xii + 302 pp.

Beyond Tolerance: Child Pornography on the Internet. Philip Jenkins. New York: New York University Press, 2001. xii + 260 pp.

A City Possessed: The Christchurch Civic Crèche Case. Lynley Hood. Dunedin: Longacre, 2001. 672 pp.

Sex-Crime Panic: A Journey to the Paranoid Heart of the 1950s. Neil Miller. Los Angeles: Alyson, 2002. xvii + 313 pp.

In three courses now, I have asked my students if they agree with Judith Levine's fundamental argument in Harmful to Minors: that, contrary to popular wisdom, it is fear and ignorance regarding sex, and not consensual sexual activity itself, that are harmful to young people. My students—bright, culturally diverse seventeen- to twenty-five-year-olds—almost always agree. They argue, far more sophisticatedly than I could have at their age, that the choice to be sexually active is an important exercise in personal agency; that to become a "good lover" a person needs to experience and to experiment; that everyone has a certain right to pleasure and gratification. I then point them to page 89 of Levine's book, where she endorses a Dutch law that decriminalizes sex between adults and adolescents aged twelve to fifteen but allows these young people or their parents to complain to a judge if they believe that the sex was coerced or exploitative. This time, again uniformly, my students object. "Twelve years old is way too young . . . ," they usually begin.

Many people are not so ambivalent about Levine's book. They hate it. Even before Harmful to Minors appeared in bookstores in early 2002, some right-wing activists accused Levine, a New York-based journalist, of promoting pedophilia. State legislators threatened to defund the book's publisher, the University of Minnesota Press, and conservative commentators Dr. Laura Schlessinger and Michael Savage added their combined four cents. Meanwhile, liberal publications such as the Nation and the New York Times devoted extensive space to the story, turning the book into a cause célèbre.¹

I could not disagree more with Levine's critics. At a moment when sexuality is being sanitized and privatized and family values serves as a feel-good code term for "parental control," Harmful to Minors makes a stunning case for sexual autonomy and pleasure. Indeed, its focus on pleasure sets it apart from many other good and serious recent books about sexual politics, and it is this focus that most upsets social conservatives. Like any book, Harmful to Minors has some faults. Far more important, however, are its many pluses, not the least of which are a deep respect for the intelligence of children and adolescents and a healthy skepticism of the prevailing discourses of sexual danger. In this respect, Harmful to Minors mirrors another rich and controversial book, James R. Kincaid's Erotic Innocence. (Kincaid himself has received more than his share of unfair criticism, alas. Apparently without bothering to read Erotic Innocence, the conservative watchdogs at Accuracy in Academia dubbed him "a supporter of sex between children and adults.")² Levine's work details how laws that purportedly protect children's sexual safety often fail to do so and instead criminalize innocent adults. Similarly, Philip Jenkins's Moral Panic looks at a century's worth of sometimes unnecessary, often unsuccessful child protection initiatives. More recently, in Beyond Tolerance Jenkins has described a real threat that the Web poses. Finally, two other books offer pointed insight into the ways that social fears over children's sexuality often are exacerbated by, or culminate in, sex panics: Lynley Hood's City Possessed and...