A month before its publication, a provocative book about children's sexuality is being denounced by conservatives as evil and prompting angry calls for action against the University of Minnesota Press.
The book, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children From Sex, argues that young Americans, though bombarded with sexual images from the mass media, are often deprived of realistic advice about sex.
"What's happening to me is a perfect example of the very hysteria that my book is about," New York-based author Judith Levine said in an interview.
Levine has been working on the book since the mid-1990s. With the recent sex scandals involving clergy and young people, she admits it's a particularly challenging time to make her case that American youth are entitled to safe, satisfying sex lives. Publisher after publisher rejected the book - one called its contents "radioactive" - before the University of Minnesota Press accepted the manuscript a year ago.
Writes Levine in her introduction, "In America today, it is nearly impossible to publish a book that says children and teen-agers can have sexual pleasure and be safe too."
From the outset, officials at the Minnesota press knew the book would be controversial; they had the manuscript reviewed by five academic experts, instead of the usual two, to be sure its contentions were based on sound research.
Still, the uproar exceeded expectations after the book was condemned on conservative Internet sites.

"We've never seen anything quite this angry," said the press director, Douglas Armato. "The book isn't actually out yet. What people are reacting to is not the book itself, but the idea of the book."
In "Harmful to Minors," Levine argues that abstinence-only sex education is misguided. She also suggests the threat of pedophilia and molestation by strangers is exaggerated by adults who want to deny young people the opportunity for positive sexual experiences.
"Squeamish or ignorant about the facts, parents appear willing to accept the pundits' worst conjectures about their children's sexual motives," Levine writes. "It's as if they cannot imagine that their kids seek sex for the same reasons they do."
Levine said much of the furor over her book stems from an interview she gave last month to Newhouse News Service, amid the Roman Catholic Church sex-abuse scandal. Newhouse quoted her as saying a sexual relationship between a priest and a youth "conceivably" could be positive.
Levine said this week that she disapproves of any sexual relationship between a youth and an authority figure, whether a parent, teacher or priest. However, she believes teen-agers deserve more respect for the choices they make in consensual affairs, and suggests that America's age-of-consent laws can sometimes lead to excessive punishment.
She cites the Dutch age-of-consent law as a "good model" - it permits sex between an adult and a young person between 12 and 16 if the young person consents. Prosecutions for coercive sex may be sought by the young person or the youth's parents.
"Teens often seek out sex with older people, and they do so for understandable reasons: an older person makes them feel sexy and grown-up, protected and special," writes Levine, who had an affair with an adult when she was a minor.
Several conservative media commentators and activists have accused Levine of condoning child abuse.
Robert Knight, director of Concerned Women for America's Culture and Family Institute, is urging the University of Minnesota to fire the university press officials who decided to publish the book.
"The action is so grievous and so irresponsible that I felt they relinquished their right to academic freedom," said Knight, who has described the book as "very evil."
Armato said he has informed university officials about the irate reaction to the book and explained to them how the decision to publish was made. He stressed that the book was accepted not out of hopes for a profit but because the University of Minnesota Press thought its arguments were worth public debate.
"What we've encouraged them to do is let the book speak for itself," Armato said. "The book is very nuanced and very complex."
Levine, a journalist and author who writes often about sex and gender, has no children of her own. She writes in her introduction that some publishers felt her book was insufficiently "parent-friendly."
Parents deserve support and respect, but so do young people, she said.
She said the weakening of comprehensive sex education programs has left sexually active teen-agers uninformed about ways to protect themselves from AIDS and other diseases, and ignorant about contraception.
"Operating in an atmosphere of complete ignorance, it's very easy to exaggerate threats and foment fear," she said. "America's drive to protect kids from sex protects them from nothing. Instead, it is often harming them."

 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. Larry Constantine, a Massachusetts family therapist and sex-book writer, said children "have the right to express themselves sexually, which means that they may or may not have contact with people older than themselves." Wardell Pomeroy, coauthor of the original Kinsey reports, said incest "can sometimes be beneficial." A Minnesota sociologist included pedophile sex among "intimate human relations [that] are important and precious." There were more.

My article caused some commotion, so budding apologists for child molesters' lib ran for cover. Since then, frank endorsements of adult-child sex have become rare. But pro-pedophilia (or anti-antipedophilia) rationalizations of the early '80s are still in play. Among them: Children are sexual beings with the right to pick their partners; the quality of relationships, not age, determines the value of sex; most pedophiles are gentle and harmless; the damage of pedophilia comes mostly from the shocked horror communicated by parents, not from the sex itself.

For example, take the controversy over the new sex book Harmful to Minors: the Perils of Protecting Children from Sex. The mini-uproar comes from the fact that the author, a journalist named Judith Levine, recycles some of the old arguments that play down the dangers of pedophilia. (The book has a foreword by former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, so don't say you weren't warned.) Levine says pedophiles are rare and often harmless. The real danger, she thinks, is not the pedophile but parents and parental figures who project their fears and their own lust for young flesh onto the mythically dangerous child molester. One section carries the headline "The enemy is us."

Priestly lapse. Levine opposes incest and adult-child sex that involves authorities with power over kids. That would seem to include predatory priests, but Levine thought this was a good time to endorse some priest-boy sex. She told Mark O'Keefe of the Newhouse papers that "yes, conceivably, absolutely" a boy's sexual relationship with a priest could be positive.

Harmful to Minors is a classic example of how disorder in the intellectual world leaks into the popular culture. In this case, I think the leakage comes from the Rind study, which caused a national furor after it appeared in 1998 in the Psychological Bulletin, a publication of the American Psychological Association. The study's conclusion that child sex abuse "does not cause intense harm on a pervasive basis" was the highest-level endorsement yet of the no-harm rationalization for child sexual abuse. Understandably, the Rind study is the new bible of pedophiles and their groups.

The study also called for a sweeping change in language used to discuss child sexual abuse (a term the study rejected as judgmental). This delighted the pedophile movement, which favors terms like "intergenerational intimacy." One critic of Rind mockingly asked whether the word rape should now be changed to "unilaterally consenting adult-adult sex."

The Rind study was a meta-analysis, an academic term for noodling around with other people's old studies instead of conducting your own. Meta-analyses notoriously leave lots of room for omissions and arbitrary decisions to somehow fit together different studies with different standards and definitions.

The major point about the Rind study is not whether it was intellectually shoddy (though I think it was) but that it shifted the national discussion several degrees toward the normalization of pedophilia. It will take a great deal more to convince the American people that tots have the right to select adult sex partners. But the terrain has been changed. Instead of virtually all Americans versus the pedophiles, the Rind team (who grandly compare their case to the travails of Galileo) invited us to see it as scientific and fair-minded people who believe in openness and dialogue versus meddling, antiscientific, right-wing moralists. It invites the left and the center to view antipedophilia traditionalists as the real problem, just as Levine says "the enemy is us," not pedophiles.

Here's an example of the terrain change. For more than 20 years, pedophile advocate Tom O'Carroll has been a stigmatized outsider. Now he has been invited to address an international sex convention in Paris on the subject of privacy rights of pedophiles and their child partners (or targets). His pro-pedophilia book is on a course list at Cambridge University. O'Carroll is surprised and delighted by his new stature and thinks the Rind study brought it about. Intellectually respectable pedophilia? What's next?

  As you can tell from the John Leo piece in US News & World Report, posted by [another researcher], my book, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Sex, has come under attack from the same people who went after Bruce Rind and his colleagues. This is the same coterie of right-wing Christian organizations, talk-radio jockeys, and now, "dissociationists" and other therapists whose practice employs "recovered memories" and frequently applies the diagnosis of multiple personality. the founding axiom of their work is that sexual abuse is at the heart of a great deal of (if not all?) later psychopathology.
Many of these people were instrumental in keeping the notion of satanic ritual abuse alive for 15 years. Judith Riesman, a complete nut, called me (and Bruce etc.) members of a clique of "academic pedophiles" in the Boston Globe. She was famous in 1985 for publishing a report that found Playboy and Penthouse riddled with chld porn. Even the Justice Dept. which funded her for $734,000, foudn it so flawed that they refused to publish it.

The straightforward ideological rhetoric of the Right is easy to attack. They are also campaigning against teaching "the lie of evolution" in schools, after all. But these psychologists are tougher-- many of them members of the Leadership Council, which was set up to counter the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, a group of therapists, memory researchers, and accused parents organized to expose the harms of false memories of abuse. The LC people are being quoted in the press as legitimate psychologists with no political agenda.

My book, let me reassure you, does not minimize the effects of real child abuse. Its discussion of "the pedophile" deals more with the recurring image, historically, of the child molester, and what this means culturally. It does question statutory rape law, which excludes the possibility of a teen consenting to sex with a legal adult. But that's two chapters of an 11-chap book. Which I am certain is mostly under attack because it argues that children and teens are autonomous sexual beings, need guidance and education, but also must be respected as such. Of all heresies, it says safe, consensual sexual pleasure is a good part of growing up.

I've had the immediate and firm support of the free speech community, which has written the U[niversity] of M[innesota] Press in support of the publication and against the U[niversity] itself, which responsded to pressure from the legislature by putting the Press under "review" of its editorial practices. But the sexuality community has not done the same.
Make no mistake (as Dubya would say), you are under attack. One of my detractors said that anyone who argues that children are sexual and stands up for children's autonomy, or (esp.) says (as Rind did) that not all adult-minor sex is harmful, raises "a red flag" that they really have a pro-pedophile agenda. It's not just renegade views of child sexuality, but ALL work on child sexuality that doesn't basically condemn the whole ball of wax, that is condemned in this atmosphere. Vern Bullough, Theo Sandfort, and others who have done work in this area have been tarred, as I have been, as pedophile advocates. At least Vern has been crippled in doing any research.

If any of you are willing to be interviewed by the media, or are willing to write to the U[niversity] of M[innesota] Press or write about this controversy in the media, please let me know. The Press will be happy to send you a review copy of the book right away. The person to call there is Alison Aten, 612-627-1932.

Thanks, Judith Levine