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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
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
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 and 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. Voil, a «firestorm of controversy.»