Текст книги "Вредно для несовершеннолетних (ЛП)"

Автор книги: Джудит Левин

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 27 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

15. This difficulty of putting emotions into words—what one writer called "alyxrythmia"—has been all but naturalized as a masculine trait. (A good example of interpreting everything as biological, even when the description is clearly social, is "Boys Will Be Boys," Newsweek's cover story of May 11, 1998.) But there's plenty of evidence it is completely socialized. Janet R. Kahn interviewed 326 families in 1976 and again in 1983 and found that, across class and race, parents talked less often to their boys about fewer topics related to sexuality and relationships and that fathers talked with their kids far less than mothers. The situation was so serious for boys that she called it «conversational neglect.» Kahn, «Speaking across Cultures within Your Own Family.»

16. William Pollack, Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood (New York: Random House, 1998), 150-51.

17. Pollack, Real Boys, 151.

18. Susan E. Hickman and Charleen L. Muehlenhard, "By the Semi-Mystical Appearance of a Condom: How Young Women and Men Communicate Sexual Consent," paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex, Houston, Texas, November 1996.

19. Alwyn Cohall, speaking at a Planned Parenthood of New York conference, Adolescent Sexual Health: New Data and Implications for Services and Programs, October, 26, 1998. 20. Kaiser Family Foundation, "National Survey of Teens on Dating, Intimacy, and Sexual Experiences," reported by SIECUS, SHOP Talk Bulletin 2 (April 17, 1998).

10. Good Touch

1. Ashley Montagu, Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin, 3d ed. (New York: Harper and Row/Perennial, 1986), 33.

2. Stephen J. Suomi, "The Role of Touch in Rhesus Monkey Social Development," in Catherine Caldwell Brown, ed., The Many Facets of Touch (n.p.: Johnson and Johnson Baby Products, 1996), 41-50. 3. Montagu, Touching, 97-99.

4. Madtrulika Gupta et al., "Perceived Touch Deprivation and Body Image: Some Observations among Eating Disordered and Non-Clinical Subjects," Journal of Psychosomatic Research 39 (May 1995): 459-64.

5. The French children were touched more. Author interview, 1999.

6. James W. Prescott, "Body Pleasure and the Origins of Violence," Futurist (April 1975): 66.

7. Clellan S. Ford and Frank A. Beach, Patterns of Sexual Behavior (New York: Harper/Colophon Books, 1951), 180.

8. Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1948), 177. Kinsey also notes observations of infant girls in «masturbatory activity» to what he called orgasm. Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, Clyde E. Martin, and Paul H. Gebhard, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1953), 141-42.

9. Robin J. Lewis and Louis H. Janda, "The Relationship between Adult Sexual Adjustment and Childhood Experiences Regarding Exposure to Nudity, Sleeping in the Parental Bed, and Parental Attitudes toward Sexuality," Archives of Sexual Behavior 17, no. 4 (1988): 349-62; Paul Okami, «Childhood Exposure to Parental Nudity, Parent-Child Co-Sleeping, and 'Primal Scenes': A Review of Clinical Opinion and Empirical Evidence,» Journal of Sex Research 32, no. 1 (1995): 51-64.

10. Tamar Lewin, "Breast-Feeding: How Old Is Too Old?" New York Times, February 18, 2001, «Week in Review.»

11. Lewin, "Breast-Feeding."

12. Richard Johnson, unpublished manuscript, March 1998.

13. This has been reported to me by many sex educators, including the veteran Peggy Brick, of Planned Parenthood of Greater Northern New Jersey.

14. Joseph Tobin, ed., Making a Place for Pleasure in Early Childhood Education (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).

15. "It is unclear whether prevention programs are working or even that they are more beneficial than harmful," concluded N. Dickson Reppucci and Jeffrey J. Haugaard. See their "Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse: Myth or Reality," American Psychologist 44 (October 1989): 1266.

16. One study measured a 50 percent rise in fear levels among children who had been subjected to a prevention program that made use of comic-book characters. J. Garbarino, "Children's Response to a Sexual Abuse Prevention Program: A Study of the Spiderman Comic," Child Abuse and Neglect: The International Journal 11 (1987): 143-48.

17. Bonnie Trudell and M. Whatley, "School Sexual Abuse Prevention: Unintended Consequences and Dilemmas," Child Abuse and Neglect 12 (1988): 108.

18. Thomas W. Laqueur, "The Social Evil, the Solitary Vice, and Pouring Tea," in Solitary Pleasures, ed. Bennett and Rosario, 157.

19. Alice Balint, The Psychoanalysis of the Nursery (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953), 79.

20. Benjamin Spock, Baby and Child Care, rev. ed. (New York: Pocket Books, 1976), 411.

21. John H. Gagnon, "Attitudes and Responses of Parents to Pre-Adolescent Masturbation," Archives of Sexual Behavior 14 (1985): 451.

22. Congressional Record, 103d Congress, 2d session, 1994, vol. 140, H 9995-10001.

23. Joycelyn Elders, "The Dreaded 'M' Word," in nerve: Literate Smut, ed. Genevieve Field and Rufus Griscom (New York: Broadway Books, 1998), 130.

24. William N. Friedrich and Patricia Grambsch, "Child Sexual Behavior Inventory: Normative and Clinical Comparison," Psychological Assessment 4 (1992): 303-11.

25. Friedrich and Grambsch, "Child Sexual Behavior Inventory."

26. Robin L. Leavitt and Martha Bauman Power, "Civilizing Bodies: Children in Day Care," in Making a Place for Pleasure in Early Childhood Education, ed. Tobin, 39-75.

27. Leavitt and Power, "Civilizing Bodies," 45-46.

28. Peggy Brick, Sue Montford, and Nancy Blume, Healthy Foundations: The Teacher's Book (Hackensack, N.J.: Center for Family Life Education/Planned Parenthood of Greater Northern New Jersey, 1993), 2-7.

29. Larry L. Constantine and Floyd M. Martinson, eds., Children and Sex: New Findings, New Perspectives (Boston: Little, Brown, 1981), 30.

30. Nancy Blackman, "Pleasure and Touching: Their Significance in the Development of the Preschool Child," paper delivered at the International Symposium on Childhood and Sexuality, Montreal, September 1979.

31. Outercourse was named, but not invented, in the 1970s. Even before the eighteenth century, when travel was slow and distances long, there was "bundling." "The practice allowed a [courting] couple to spend a night together in bed as long as they remained fully clothed or, in some cases, kept a 'bundling board' between them. . . . Parents and youth shared the expectation that sexual intercourse would not take place, but if it did, and pregnancy resulted, the couple would certainly marry." John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 22.

32. Marty Klein and Riki Robbins, Let Me Count the Ways: Discovering Great Sex without Intercourse (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1998), 125.

33. Leonore Tiefer, "Bring Back the Kids' Stuff," in Sex Is Not a Natural Act, 71. Note from a detractor who read this chapter: «This strikes me as a crock, remembering instances of petting with strangers. ...»

34. Tiefer, "Bring Back the Kids' Stuff," 70.

35. Advocates for Youth, "Adolescent Sexual Health in Europe and the U.S." (2001). 36. Klein and Robbins, Let Me Count the Ways.

11. Community

1. Patton, Fatal Advice, 34. Patton was not the only one to indict abstinence education as a killer. In 1997, the International AIDS Conference proclaimed that the abstinence-only «approach place[d] policy in direct conflict with science and ignore[d] overwhelming evidence that other programs would be effective.» In the face of a worldwide health crisis, conferees strongly suggested, teaching «just say no» was worse than a waste of public resources. It was lethal.

2. Half of the forty thousand new HIV infections a year are in people under twenty-five, according to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health. Bill Alexander, "Adolescent HIV Rates Soar; Government Piddles," Youth Today (March/April 1997): 29.

3. They were down 44 percent in the first six months of 1997 compared with 1996. Altman, "AIDS Deaths Drop 48% in New York."

4. Hilts, "AIDS Deaths Continue to Rise in 25-44 Age Group."

5. Including those who inject drugs, the numbers fell from 65 percent in 1981 to 44 percent in 1996. Centers for Disease Control, Atlanta, Ga., March 1996.

6. Interview with Gary Remafedi, director of the University of Minnesota/Minneapolis Youth and AIDS Project, 1998.

7. "Rate of AIDS Has Slowed," New York Times, April 25, 1998, A9. African Americans make up half of new HIV infections and 40 percent of full-blown AIDS cases. Doug Ireland, «Silence Kills Blacks,» Nation (April 20, 1998): 6. Poor neighborhoods, where almost everybody knows somebody with the disease, are being ravaged. In the South Bronx, for instance, AIDS is the leading cause of death in children (interview with GMHC spokesman, 1999).

8. Altman, "Study in 6 Cities Finds HIV in 30% of Young Black Gays."

9. Cherrie B. Boyer and Susan M. Kegeles, "AIDS Risk and Prevention among Adolescents," Social Science Medicine 33, no. 1 (1991): 11-23.

10. New York City Health Department, phone interview, April 1999.

11. Barbara Crossette, "In India and Africa, Women's Low Status Worsens Their Risk of AIDS," New York Times, February 26, 2001.

12. B. R. Simon Rossner, "New Directions in HIV Prevention," SIECUS Report 26 (December 1997/January 1998): 6.

13. Governments of developing countries have won some concessions from the major pharmaceutical companies, but many observers believe these are too little, too late.

14. The following remarks from people in the Twin Cities came from interviews that I conducted during my visit there in 1998.

15. District 202 Youth Survey (Minneapolis, 1997).

16. District 202 Youth Survey.

17. Marsha S. Sturdevant and Gary Remafedi, "Special Health Needs of Homosexual Youth," in Adolescent Medicine: State of the Art Reviews (Philadelphia: Hanley and Belfus, 1992), 364. The authors cite a study of male prostitutes and other delinquent young men that found that 70 percent of the former group considered themselves gay or bisexual compared with only 4 percent of the latter. D. Boyer, «Male Prostitution and Homosexual Identity,» Journal of Homosexuality 15 (1989): 151.

18. R. Stall and J. Wiley, "A Comparison of Alcohol and Drug Use Patterns of Homosexual and Heterosexual Men: The San Francisco Men's Health study," Drug and Alcohol Dependence 22 (1988): 63-73.

19. "Although there is a significant relationship between substance use and high risk sexual activity, substance use does not cause sexual risk taking," according to a compilation of research by Advocates for Youth. "At-risk teens tend to engage in several inter-related high risk behaviors at once." Marina McNamara, "Adolescent Behavior: II. Socio-Psychological Factors," Advocates for Youth fact sheet, Washington, D.C., September 1997.

20. Studies suggest that as many as 35 percent of young gay males and 30 percent of lesbians have considered or tried suicide. Alan Bell and Martin Weinberg, Homosexualities (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978). As for kids who succeed in self-annihilation, the 1989 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Task Force on Youth Suicide reported that 30 percent may be gay.

21. Gary Remafedi, Michael Resnick, Robert Blum, and Linda Harris, "Demography of Sexual Orientation in Adolescents," Pediatrics 89, no. 4 (April 1992).

22. Patton, Fatal Advice.

23. U.S. Conference of Mayors, "Safer Sex Relapse: A Contemporary Challenge," AIDS Information Exchange 11, no. 4 (1994): 1-8.

24. Altman, "Study in 6 Cities."

25. D. Boyer, "Male Prostitution and Homosexual Identity," Journal of Homosexuality 9 (1984): 105.

26. In one study of New York kids selling sex on the street, only 36 percent of respondents had failed to protect themselves in the last encounter. S. L. Bailey et al., "Substance Use and Risky Sexual Behavior among Homeless and Runaway Youth," Journal of Adolescent Health 23 (December 1998): 378-88.

27. Amy Bracken, "STDs Discriminate," Youth Today (March 2001): 7-8.

28. Minnesota's Youth without Homes (St. Paul: Wilder Research Center, 1997), 5.

29. Ine Vanwesenbeeck, "The Context of Women's Power(lessness) in Heterosexual Interactions," in New Sexual Agendas, ed. Lynne Segal (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 173. A 1998 study of homeless youth, however, found that only 36 percent of respondents, who were mostly female, did not use a condom with a casual partner, and the less-well-known a partner was, the more likely they were to use a condom. S. L. Bailey et al., «Substance Use and Risky Sexual Behavior.»

30. Author interview, New York, 1999.

31. E. Matinka-Tyndale, "Sexual Scripts and AIDS Prevention: Variations in Adherence to Safer Sex Guidelines in Heterosexual Adolescents," Journal of Sex Research 28 (1991): 45-66; S. J. Misovich, J. D. Fisher, and W. A. Fisher, «The Perceived AIDS-Preventive Utility of Knowing One's Partner Well: A Public Health Dictum and Individuals' Risky Sexual Behaviour,» Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality 5 (1996): 83-90; Linda Feldman, Philippa Holowaty, et al., «A Comparison of the Demographic, Lifestyle, and Sexual Behaviour Characteristics of Virgin and Non-Virgin Adolescents,» Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality 6, no 3. (fall 1997): 197-209.

32. Carla Willig, "Trust as a Risky Practice," in New Sexual Agendas, ed. Segal, 125-35.

33. Graham Hart, "'Yes, but Does It Work?' Impediments to Rigorous Evaluations of Gay Men's Health Promotion," in New Sexual Agendas, ed. Segal, 119. Gary Remafedi, «Predictors of Unprotected Intercourse among Gay and Bisexual Youth: Knowledge, Beliefs, and Behavior,» Pediatrics 94, no. 2 (1994): 163.

34. Sarah R. Phillips, "Turning Research into Policy: A Survey on Adolescent Condom Use," SIECUS Report (October/November 1995): 10.

35. Willig, "Trust as a Risky Practice," 126.

36. Willig, "Trust as a Risky Practice," 130.

37. Regarding adults who stray, the 1994 University of Chicago "Sex in America" survey put the numbers at 25 percent of married men and 12 percent of married women, but these statistics do not include unmarried committed heterosexual or gay couples and have been considered by others to be extremely conservative. Other studies have found higher incidences. In their extensive 1983 survey, Pepper Schwartz and Philip Blumenstein divided their subjects among married couples, heterosexual cohabitors, and gay and lesbian couples. Their numbers for "nonmonogamy" ranged from 21 percent for wives to 82 percent for gay male cohabitors. Of course, their study was done before widespread awareness of AIDS. Pepper Schwartz and Philip Blumstein, American Couples: Money, Work, Sex (New York: Pocket Books, 1983). Regarding the number of teens who stray, see Susan L. Rosenthal et al., «Heterosexual Romantic Relationships and Sexual Behaviors of Young Adolescent Girls,» Journal of Adolescent Health 21 (1997): 238-43.

38. Of these, African American teen males report the highest use, at 72 percent, with whites and Hispanics following at 70 percent and 59 percent, respectively. Freya L. Sonenstein and Joseph H. Pleck et al., "Change in Sexual Behavior and Contraception among Adolescent Males: 1988 and 1995," Urban Institute report, Washington, D.C., 1996.

39. Willig, "Trust as a Risky Practice," 130.

40. Jeffrey Weeks, Invented Moralities: Sexual Values in an Age of Uncertainty (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 42.

Epilogue

1. Jane E. Brody, "A Stitch in Time," New York Times, March 21, 1999, «Week in Review,» 2.

2. Steve Farkas et al., Kids These Days: What Americans Really Think about the Next Generation (New York: Public Agenda, 1997).

3. Children's Defense Fund, Web site, 1999.

4. "The State of the World's Children 2000," United Nations/UNICEF report (accessed at www.unicef.org/sowc00/).

5. "Study Says Welfare Changes Made the Poorest Worse Off," New York Times, August 23, 1999; Elizabeth Becker, «Millions Eligible for Food Stamps Aren't Applying,» New York Times, February 26, 2001.

6. Matt Pacenza, "911, a Food Emergency: Soup Kitchens Are Flooded," City Limits Weekly Web site, October 1, 2001.

7. These data come from a small but well-controlled sample. Patrick Boyle, "Does Welfare Reform Hurt Teens?" News Briefs, Youth Today (March 2001): 6-7.

8. Children's Defense Fund, Web site, 1999.

9. Most of these children live in homes in which at least one parent has a job. State of America's Children Yearbook 2001 (Washington, D.C.: Children's Defense Fund, 2001).

10. David G. Gil, "The United States versus Child Abuse," in The Social Context of Child Abuse and Neglect, ed. Leroy H. Pelton (New York: Human Sciences Press, 1981), 294.

11. Ethan Bronner, "Long a Leader, U.S. Now Lags in High School Graduate Rate," New York Times, November 24, 1998, A1.

12. Children's Defense Fund, Web site, 2001.

13. Forty percent of prison inmates twenty-five and older are illiterate. Marc Maurer, "Young Black Men and the Criminal Justice System: A Growing National Problem," The Sentencing Project report, Washington, D.C., 1990.

14. At this writing, President George W. Bush and the Republican Party used the September 11 attacks and the ensuing war in Afghanistan to push through an economic "stimulus package" including more tax cuts for the richest individuals and the elimination of the minimum corporate tax. The GOP resisted such Democratic demands as increased, more easily obtained unemployment insurance for people who have lost their jobs since the attacks.

15. Gisela Konopka, "Requirements for Healthy Development of Adolescent Youth," Adolescence 8 (1973): 1-26.

(Послесловие ко второму изданию «Вредно для несовершеннолетних»)

Afterword

A month before the April 2002 publication of Harmful to Minors , in the middle of the Catholic Church's sex abuse scandal, I received a call from a reporter for a syndicated news service. His story focused on academics who were questioning the orthodoxy that every sexual experience between a minor and an adult is unwanted by the former, traumatic, and permanently damaging. A friend had referred the reporter to me, thinking that my academic-press book could use a little free publicity.

Although I began by informing the reporter that only a small portion of my book is about sex between adults and minors, I told him I agreed with researchers who believe the term «abuse» had become so broad as to be virtually useless. Fortunately, research was creating a more nuanced picture of the «victims» and their experiences; for instance, it was making distinctions between being raped nightly by a father and groped once by a stranger at the pool. Even the same act does not feel the same to everyone, I said. Some children or teens are traumatized, others unmoved, and some say they initiated the sex and enjoyed it.

«Could a priest and a boy conceivably have a positive sexual experience together?» the reporter asked.

« Conceivably? Absolutely it's conceivable,» I answered, «because the data tell us that some kids report such relationships as positive.» I cited a large meta-analysis of the abuse literature by Temple University psychologist Bruce Rind and two colleagues, published in the Psychological Bulletin of the American Psychological Association, which found that not all minor-adult sex is traumatic at the time nor leads to long-term harm; boys were likely to call the experiences neutral or positive, girls negative or abusive. The researchers stressed that their work was not meant to exonerate anyone. Rather, they hoped that isolating the factors that render such sexual events painful for the child or troubling long into adulthood could help in tailoring more effective therapies.

I knew I was treading on dangerous turf when I praised Rind. In 1997, he was the target of conservative radio talk show host «Dr.» Laura Schlesinger and Judith Reisman, a prominent right-wing activist against pornography, sex education, and sex research, who has made a career of discrediting pioneer sexologist Alfred Kinsey. An anti-homosexual group had objected to Rind's study and gotten in touch with Dr. Laura. She denounced him repeatedly on the air as an apologist for pedophilia and soon was joined by a coalition of Christian conservative organizations. They in turn found support from a group of therapists who specialize in the aftereffects of sexual abuse and whose work is based on the axiom that all child-adult sex leads to adult psychopathology; more controversially, many also believe that a troubled patient is likely to have sexual abuse in her past, even if she doesn't remember it and therefore needs the therapist's help in «recovering memories.» Dr. Laura and her friends eventually persuaded Congress to censure the APA for publishing work that suggested sexual abuse was not always harmful. Rather than defend its scientific peer-review process, the APA issued a mea culpa and vowed to vet politically sensitive material more carefully in the future. Dr. Laura's victorious legions looked for other infidels to subdue.

They found me. A few days after the interview with the syndicate's reporter, his story ran in the Web edition of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, my publisher's hometown paper, under the headline, «University of Minnesota Press Book Challenges Demonization of Pedophilia.» I was quoted this way: «[Levine] said the pedophilia among Roman Catholic priests is complicated to analyze, because it's almost always secret, considered forbidden and involves an authority figure. She added, however, that, 'yes, conceivably, absolutely' a boy's sexual experience with a priest could be positive.»

Although Harmful to Minors discusses pedophiles hardly at all, overnight I became the author of «the pedophilia book.» Although the book doesn't condone, much less promote, child molesting, that was suddenly its reputation.

Within days, the University of Minnesota Press was inundated with calls. Half were demanding that the press's management resign and Harmful to Minors – and maybe its author—be burned. The rest were from producers from talk shows. My publicist in New York was playing off requests from The Today Show against Good Morning America and Fox's Greta Van Susteren. The AM-radio shock jocks were the most numerous and persistent. «My host is very fair, very intelligent,» one from Los Angeles told me. With the sensitivity of an eagle a mile downwind of a field mouse, he could sniff his prey through the phone line. When he realized he was stalking an egghead, he added, «She's an NPR type.»

She wasn't.

«So, Judith, do you have any children?» the host asked, a few minutes into the interview.

«No, no children.» I confessed, followed by a petition for indulgence: «I have a niece and nephew.»

«Do you touch your niece and nephew?»

«Of course I touch them.»

«And how do you touch them?»

I could feel where this was going, but was powerless to escape. «I hug and kiss them, I stroke their hair, I rub their backs.»

«And at what age would you say it was appropriate to start touching your niece and nephew in order to initiate them into sex?»

I gulped, then declared, «Never, never!» But it sounded feeble. She'd already asked me when I stopped beating my wife.

I hung up the phone and dialed my publicist, Katie. «Tell the next person who calls that Judith is unavailable,» I said. «It's the second night of Passover, and she's out eating Christian children.»

A few minutes later, a friend phoned in from her car: «Hey Judith! I just heard Dr. Laura denouncing you on the radio. Congratulations!»

So, Dr. Laura was the force behind my sudden fame. I'd soon learn that she had been alerted by Judith Reisman, who also called Robert Knight, with whom she'd worked at the Christian-conservative Family Research Council. He was now at a sister organization, Concerned Women for America. In the mid-1990s, CWA had run a massive campaign against America's flagship advocate of mainstream comprehensive sexuality education, the Sex Information and Education Council of the U.S., generating 30,000 letters to Congress calling SIECUS and its sex-ed guides «blatant promoters of promiscuity, pornography, abortion, pedophilia, and incest.» Now Dr. Laura had uncovered another member of «the pro-pedophile lobby.»

I started to weep. It was late, but I called Katie again. My voice was little: «I'm cooked.»

Katie answered with the un-flak-like candor I would grow to love. «You're right. It's pretty bad.» She put me on hold to decline several invitations from other AM talk-radio shows. When she returned, she'd regained her professional pluck. «Don't worry,» she said. «We'll spin it.»

The good news was the book would get tons of publicity. Within the next two months, it was covered by scores of media outlets, from the Lancaster, PA, New Era to the New York Times , the gay and lesbian out.com to the neo-Nazi Jeff's Archives, WNBC Radio to college stations in rural Wisconsin. The bad news was that most of the publicity was about a book I didn't write.

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 «disgusting,» and «an endorsement of child molestation.» He got more than 50 legislators to demand that the University suppress the book's publication. With alerts on the Christian Right Web sites, hundreds of e-mails and calls poured into the Press's office supporting this demand. None of these people had read the book, which was not yet available. When a protest at the university president's house drew only a few participants, its organizer, the lone member of his own political party, undertook a hunger strike (reliable sources observed him drinking a canned protein shake, after which I called him my dieting striker).

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 «normalizing» children's sexuality, Sigmund Freud, to the public school teacher who utters the word clitoris in a seventh-grade classroom.

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.