Introduction
The short of all this, is that adult’s have a long history of assigning idealized meanings to childhood and youth, and have raised and restricted them based on these ideas. A baby isn’t just a baby – a baby is a pure untainted being; or the opposite is true, a baby is born sinful and must seek salvation through growth. In the case of Victorian and Puritan America values, the child became “innocent” of sexuality, and therefor sexual information became considered a source of “corruption” for the child. A mixture of those Puritan and Victorian beliefs, alongside feminist concerns about sexual abuse and pornography as a tool of the patriarchy, led to the belief that expressions of sexuality are inherently dangerous or traumatic for young people.
Because of this way of thinking (even without evidence to back it up) we’ve culturally restricted young people from sexual expression and information in the name of “protection.”
This book, at bottom, is about fear. American’s fears about child sexuality are both peculiarly contemporary (I am certain I would not have had the same troubles twenty-five years ago) and forged deep in history. Harmful to Minors recounts how that fear got its claws into America in the late twentieth century and how, abetted by a sentimental, sometimes cynical, politics of child protectionism, it now dominates the ways we think and act about children’s sexuality. The book investigates the policies and practices that affect children’s and teens’ quotidian sexual lives—censorship, psychology, sex education, family, criminal, and reproductive law, and journalism and parenting advice that begs for “solutions” while exciting more terror, like those trick birthday candles that reignite each time you blow them out.
The architect and practitioners of all the above use the term child protection for what they do. But, as the stories of real children and families in this book show, they often accomplish the opposite. Indeed, the sexual politics of fear is harmful to minors.
According to the influential French historian Philippe Aries, European societies before the eighteenth century did not recognize what we now call childhood, defined as a long period of dependency and protection lasting into physical and social maturity. Until the mid 1700s, he wrote, not long after weaning, people “went straight into the great community of men, sharing in the work and play of their companies, old and young alike.” At seven, a person might be sent off to become a scullery maid or a shoemaker’s apprentice; by fourteen, he could be a soldier or a king, a spouse and a parent; by forty, more than likely, he’d be dead.17
Concerning sexuality and its role in worldly corruption, children were regarded quite differently before the eighteenth century from how they are today: they were not necessarily “good,” nor adults “bad,” merely by virtue of length of their tenure on earth. In Puritan America, in fact, the opposite was true. Infants were conceived and born in sin, but they were considered perfectible through religious guidance and socialization, which happened as they got older. Early colonial toys and children’s furniture, wrote Karin Calvert in her marvelous history of the material culture of childhood in America, “pushed the child forward into contact with adults and the adult world. The sharing of beds with grown-ups, the use of leading strings and go-carts to place children in the midst of adult activities, and other practices all derived from a world view that saw development from the imperfect infant to the civilized adult as a natural and desirable progression.”19
In the mid-eighteenth century, first in Europe, ideologies about this “progression” reversed. As the cultural critic James Kincaid has shown, the English and French philosophers of the Romantic Era conjured the Child as a radically distinct creature, endowed with purity and “innocence”—Rousseau’s unspoiled nature boy, Locke’s clean slate. This being, born outside history, was spoiled by entering it: the child’s innocence was threatened by the very act of growing up in the world, which entailed partaking in adult rationality and politics. In the late nineteenth century, that innocence came to be figured as we see it today: the child was not clean just of adult political or social corruption, but ignorant specifically of sexual knowledge and desire.21 Ironically, as children’s plight as workers worsened, adults sought to save them from sex.
European American ideas about the transition from prepubescent to adulthood have also undergone momentous transfiguration in recent decades. For most of recorded European history, there existed a vague period called youth, roughly consistent with what we call adolescence, but defined socially more than biologically. In colonial America as in its European home countries, young men (not women) gained economic independence gradually, in the form of inherited property, familial financial responsibility, and political rights. When their elders deemed them prepared to support a household, youth married and officially became adults.22
Sexual knowledge came gradually too, and neither the sacredness of female virginity nor the prohibition on premarital sex was universal. On the American continent during the colonial period, among slaves from West Africa “marriage sanctioned motherhood, not sexual intercourse,” and a woman usually married the father of her first child, after the fact.23 In the Chesapeake Bay Colony, because women and girls were scarce, they enjoyed a certain sexual liberty, as well as suffering considerable sexual exploitation. In Maryland, women wed as young as twelve, and extramarital sex, both wanted and unwanted, was common: before 1750 one in five maidservants gave birth to a bastard child, often the issue of rape by the master. As for Puritans, their real lives did not always evince the stuff-backed moralism with which their name has become synonymous. Premarital intercourse, though interdicted, could be redeemed by marriage, and as many as a third of New England’s brides were pregnant at the altar.24
Back in Europe, as the curtains opened on the twentieth century and Queen Victoria lay on her deathbed, the idealized child met a radical challenger: Freud. His Interpretation of Dreams posited a sexual “instinct” born in the child, incubated in the oedipal passions of family life, and eventually transformed into adult desire, ambition, creativity, or, if inadequately worked through, into neurotic suffering … In a huge eponymous time, child psychologist G. Stanley Hall coined the term adolescence—the state of becoming adult—and it tested all comers. Adolescence was a “long viaticum of ascent,” resembling nothing more than one of the hairy scenes from an Indiana Jones movie. “Because his environment is to be far more complex, there is more danger that the youth in his upward progress. . . . Will backslide,” he wrote. “New dangers threaten all sides. It is the most critical stage of life, because failure to mount almost always means retrogression, degeneracy, or fall.” Greatest among those dangers was sexual desire.
Freud’s theory of the sexually roiling unconscious was a critique of Enlightenment rationality, but he also endorsed a certain rationality as the road to maturity and social order. In their embrace of life, Freud and Hall were renegade Victorians. But they were still Victorians. The father of psychoanalysis normalized youthful sexuality, but he tucked it out of sight during most of the troubling neither-here-nor-there years of prepubescence, in “latency.”26 And Hall, even more than Freud, painted “awakened” adolescent desire as inevitably a source of trouble and pain.
All this history lives on in us: zeitgeists do not displace each other like weather systems on a computerized map. We still invest the child with romantic innocence: witness John Gray’s cherub-bedecked Children Are From Heaven. The Victorian fear of the poisonous knowledge of worldly sexuality is still with us; lately it’s reemerged in the demonic power we invest in the Internet. Hall’s image of teen sexuality as a normal pathology informs child psychology, pedagogy, and parenting: think of “risk behaviors” and “raging hormones.”
Since Freud, the sexuality of children and adolescents is officially “natural” and “normal,” yet the meanings of these terms are ever in dispute, and the expert advice dispensed in self-help books and parenting columns serves only to lubricate anxiety: Is the child engaging in sex too soon, too much? Is it sex of the wrong kind, with the wrong person, the wrong meaning? Children and teens continue to live out their diverse heritages—African slave, Chesapeake Bay colonist, errant-but-forgiven Puritan. And the modern family is vexed by its Victorian-Freudian inheritance: the self-canceling task of inducting the child into the social world of sexuality and at the same time protecting her from it.
Modern efforts to protect the idealized child while squashing the sinner, all to produce a decent adult, resemble the footbinder’s techniques of enhancing the beauty of the woman by stunting the graceful foot of the girl. Current youth policy and parenting advice teeter between high-anxiety child protection and high-anger child punishment. It would appear that children are fragilely innocent until the moment they step over some line, at which point they become instantly, irredeemably wicked. One striking pair of contradictory trends: as we raise the age of consent for sex, we lower the age at which a wrongdoing child may be tried and sentenced as an adult criminal. Both, needless to say, are “in the best interests” of the child and society.
What are the best interests of the child? Politician and public health doctor, pastor and pundit disagree on the practical strategies and tactics of ensuring those interests, because Americans disagree vastly at the questions heart: what is good, in its broad definition, not only for children but for everyone? Childhood, as we’ve seen, is historical and cultural, which makes it ideological too: it is, in addition to being a physical phenomenon, an idea constructed on the spine of moral beliefs. Childhood is historical, cultural, and moral, just like sex. And so the questions of child sexuality are moral questions.
What questions regarding child and teen sex have preoccupied Americans over the past two centuries? Mainly, whether and when. And what are the answers? No and later, when they are married or at least “mature.”
… whether and when are not the questions that this book engages, except insofar as it explores the meaning of Americans’ obsession with these questions and the ways in which they delimit our understanding of sexuality and children’s relationship to it. Lest you consider my approach peculiar or irresponsible, I remind you that in Western Europe whether and when aren’t the burning questions either. Sex education in those countries begins with the assumption that young people will carry on a number of sexual relationships during their teen years and initiate sex play short of intercourse long before that (which they do) and that sexual expression is a healthy and happy part of growing up. The goal of sex ed, which grows out of a generally more relaxed attitude towards sexuality, is to make sure that this sexual expression is healthy and happy, by teaching children and teens the values of responsibility and the techniques of safety and even if pleasure. Abstinence is not emphasized in European classrooms, if it’s discussed at all.28
Harmful to Minors says sex is not in itself harmful to minors. Rather, the real potential harm lies in the circumstances under which some children and teens have sex, circumstances that predispose them to what the public-health people call “unwanted outcomes,” such as unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, not to mention what Id also consider an unwanted outcome: plain old bad sex.
Not surprisingly, these are the same conditions that set children up to suffer many other miseries. Some, such as the denial or degradation of female and gay desire, may express themselves differently in different economic classes and social afflicters. More than 80 percent of teen mothers come from poor homes.34 A hugely disproportionate number of youngsters with AIDs are African Americans and Hispanics: Although these two groups make up only about a quarter of the general U.S population, they account for 56 percent of adolescent males with the disease and 82 percent of females.35 And nearly a third of black, gay urban men in their twenties are HIV positive.36 Even incest is correlated with poverty and the family chaos that is woven with it: a child whose parents bring in less than fifteen thousand dollars a year is eighteen times more likely to be sexually abused at home than one from a family with an income above thirty thousand dollars.
It is these unhappy conditions, and not the desire for physical intimacy, not child pornographers or abortions, not even the monstrous human immunodeficiency virus, that leave a young person with her defenses down, loitering in harm’s way. Poor people aren’t less moral than rich people. But poverty, like sex, is a phenomenon rooted in moral priorities, a result of deliberate fiscal and social policies that obstruct the fair distribution of health, education, and wealth in a wealthy country. The result, often, is an unfair distribution of sexual health and happiness, too.
For better or worse, American culture places a lot of value on sex—a lot. But if sexual expertise is expected of adults, the rudiments must be taught to children. If educators want to be credible about sexual responsibility, they have to be forthright about sexual joy. If parents want their children to be happy now and later, it is their responsibility, and should be their delight, to help them learn to love well, which is to say respectfully of others and themselves, skillfully in body and heart, morally as lovers, friends, and citizens.
For our part, adults owe children not only protection and a schooling in safety but also the entitlement to pleasure.
17 – J. H. Plumb, “The New World of Children in 18th-Century England,” Past and Present 67 (1975): 66.
19 – Karin Clavert, Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600-1900 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992).
21 – James R. Kincaid, Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992).
22 – Philip J. Greven, “Family Structure in Seventeenth Century Andover, Massachusetts,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, 23 (1966): 234-56; Kristie Lindenmeyer, “Adolescent Pregnancy in the 20th Century U.S.,” paper delivered at the Carleton Conference on the History of Family, Ottawa, May 15, 1997.
23 – Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1985), 106.
24 – John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York, Harper and Row, 1988), 12-14, 43.
26 – Kincaid, Child-Loving, 126-27.
28 – Susheela Singh and Jacqueline E. Darroch, “Adolescent Pregnancy and Childbearing: Levels and Trends in Developed Countries,” Alan Guttmacher Institute report, February 2000.
34 – Annie E. Casey Foundation Annual Report 1997 (Baltimore: Annie E. Casey Foundation, 1997).
35 – “Facts about Adolescents and HIV/AIDS,” Center for Disease Control and Prevention report, Atlanta, Ga., March 1998.
36 – Lawrence K. Altman, “Study in 6 Cities Finds HIV in 30% of Young Black Gays,” New York Times, February 6, 2001.
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