Вредно для несовершеннолетних
Шрифт:
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
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.
Sexual peril is real, just as terrorism is real. But the kind of
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.