Censorship
Censorship became the primary tool for “protecting” children from sexual information. Of course, this was largely backed by the religious Right, but it was aided by anti-porn feminists. Neither group actually had data to back up the validity of whether “protection” was needed at all.
As is to be expected, censorship online had a lot of overreach in line with Right biases. Feminist sites, gay sites, Planned Parenthood, and even free speech sites were effected. But of course—it’s definitely about protecting children, not about using censorship to restrict information that goes against a “decency” agenda.
At the turn of the twenty-first century, America is being inundated by censorship in the name of protecting “children” from “sex,” both terms capaciously defined. In the 1990s among the most frequent targets were Judy Blume’s young adult novel Deenie, in which a teenage girl likes to touch her “special place,” and Maurice Sendak’s classic In the Night Kitchen, because it’s main character, a boy about five named Max, tumbles through his dream with his genitals bare. The student editor of the University of Southern Louisiana yearbook was dismissed because she published a picture of a young woman feeding spaghetti to a young man. Both were shirtless. The New York State Liquor Authority denied a license to Bad Frog Beer. According to authority, the label—a cartoon frog with his middle finger raised and the legend “An Amphibian with Attitude”—was “harmful to minors.” Paul Zaloom, the star of the children’s television science program Dr. Beekman’s Universe, was forbidden by his producers to answer his viewers’ most-asked question: What is a fart? Even sex educators are not allowed to speak about sex. In 1996, when author Robie Harris went on the radio in Oklahoma to promote her children’s book It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex and Sexual Health, the host requested that she not mention the S-word. Harris was obliged to refer to sex as “the birds and the bees.”
Sherry Tuckle, a social analyst of computer communication at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, described the on-screen erotic exchanges that Netizens call “tiny-sex”: “A 13-year-old informs me that she prefers to do her sexual experimentation online. Her partners are usually the boys in her class at school. In person, she says, it is ‘mostly grope-y.’ Online, ‘they need to talk more.’”
Where do you learn about sex? a television interviewer asked a fifteen-year-old from a small rural town. “We have 882 channels,” the girl replied.
In a survey of thirty-two hundred urban and suburban elementary school kids in the 1970s (before MTV!), “the most productive responses were elicited with the instructions, ‘Why children shouldn’t be allowed to see R and X rated movies’; or ‘What is in R and X rated movies that children are too young to know about?’ Here, the children proceeded with aplomb to tell all that they knew but were not supposed to know.” Samuel Janus and Barbara Bess, the psychologists who conducted the study, concluded: “One learns that what the adult world has established is an adult psychic censor that will not admit of children’s growth and experience. Selective perception may becloud and avoid awareness of childhood sexuality, but it does not eliminate [that sexuality].”15
In young children, we regard curiosity as a virtue, and by the mid-twentieth century curiosity about body parts and the making of babies was considered normal and nice. In fact, curiosity is a reassuring explanation of what might otherwise look like the quest for bodily pleasure. “In a child’s mind, the investigation [of the body] is much the same as, say, tinkering with toys to see how they operate or watching birds build a nest,” Toni Cavanagh Johnson, a self-styled expert on what she calls children’s “touching problems,” told a women’s magazine advice columnist. This explanation washes when Junior is reaching into his training pants, but it is harder to countenance when he’s unzipping his baggy men’s-sized Tommy Hilifigers; now, it is a “risk behavior.” If curiosity is cute in the kitten, we suspect it could kill the cat.
Our crudest and oldest fear about letting out too much sexual information is that it will lead kids to “try this at home” as soon as they are able—a sort of user’s manual or propaganda, a model of sexual knowledge.
But learning about a sex act doesn’t toggle the desire switch to “on” or the body to “go.” Rather, one reacts to an image or idea according to her own experiences and all the scripts she’s learned. For a child, those experiences might include an incident of incest, a thrilling experience of mutual masturbation with another child, a course in good touch and bad touch, or a joke heard on the playground. The relationship between learning about sex and doing sex is “more like the world weather system than a chemical reaction,” University of Hawaii early childhood educator Joseph Tobin told me. “It’s a chaos model we need: one cause can have various effects or different effects than we expected.”
Still, the dark suspicion of a direct link between knowing and doing created from the start a conundrum that has endured for sex educators: how to inform youth about the facts of sex without flaming their lust. Educators, like parents, worry that if the right adults (“us”) do not tell kids the right things about sex (disease and reproduction) in the right way (clinically), the wrong ones will tell them the wrong things. Put another way, sex education, like obscenity law, was founded on the notion that you can separate clean sex from dirty sex.
For the purpose of edification, clean sex is the sex that occurs in committed, perfectly legally sanctioned, age-of-majority, heterosexual, reproductive relationships; and it includes responsible pre-coital conversation, safer-sex devices, and postcoital cuddling. Clean sex is “scientific.” For little kids it is still often explicated in narratives that begin with a pistil and a stamen, or a “lady fish and a gentleman fish,” as the child in Auntie Mame described them, and proceeds gingerly to the making of babies. (These “birds and bees” stories can misfire on account of young children’s literal-mindedness. In the 1980s, psychologist Anne Bernstein asked a four-year-old, “How would a lady get a baby to grow inside her?” The child, who had studied the sex-ed picture books, began, “Um, first you get a duck.”)22
The anthropologist Mary Douglas tells us that dirt is “matter out of place,” but to the child who is forbidden it, all sexual knowledge is out of place and therefore dirty. Ask the child who has thrilled at uncovering a little cache of penis-related words, right there in the dictionary between peninsulate and penitence, and she will agree with Douglas: “Dirt is in the eyes of the beholder.” A resigned father summed it up in answering a New York Times survey about media and children: “Kids are always going to want to watch what we don’t want them to.”23
In part, they want to do so because we don’t want them to. Confessing the schoolboy misdemeanor of stealing forbidden fruit, Saint Augustine, one of the father’s of Western sexual anxiety, put it this way: “My pleasure was not in those pears. It was in the offense itself.”
The idea that young minds (and female minds and feeble minds) are vulnerable to bad thoughts, which might lead to bad acts, may be considered the founding principle of the obscenity law. In 1868, an English anticlerical pamphlet called The Confessional Unmasked was deemed punishably obscene because its text might “suggest to the minds of the young of either sex, and even to persons of more advanced years, thoughts of a most impure and libidinous character.”
Evidence of the harm of exposure to sexually explicit images or words in childhood is inconclusive, even nonexistent. The 1970 U.S Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, the “Lockhart commission,” uncovered no link between adult exposure to pornography and bad behavior and called for dismantling legal restrictions on erotica. Not only did the panelists fail to find harm to children in viewing erotica, moreover, they went so far as to suggest it could “facilitate much needed communication between parent and child over sexual matters.” The 1985 Commission on Pornography (the Meese commission), chaired by Reagan’s attorney general Edwin Meese and assembled specifically to overturn the 1970 findings, could not establish factual links between sexually explicit materials and antisocial behavior either. Indeed, researchers have more evidence that the opposite is true. Interviewers of sex criminals including child molesters reveal that the children who eventually became rapists were usually exposed to pornography less than other kids;30 if they’d seen the same amount, the exposure had not occurred earlier in life than other children’s.31 According to Johns Hopkins University’s John Money, one of the world’s foremost authorities on sexual abnormalities, “the majority of patients with paraphilias”—deviant sexual fantasies and behaviors—”described a strict anti-sexual upbringing in which sex was either never mentioned or was actively repressed or defiled.”32
But such data were, in a sense, politically irrelevant. Hein’s, former head of the ACLU’s Arts Censorship Project, found that such laws were routinely passed and upheld without recourse to any evidence whatsoever.33 The moral wisdom of shielding minors from sexy materials is seen as self-evident. In spite of its findings to the contrary, and in spite of its historical moment at the height of the sexual revolution, even the liberal dominated Lockhart commission deferred to popular sentiment and refrained from recommending that restrictions be lifted on minors’ access to sexual materials.
By the time the Meese commission sat, the presumed harm to minors of dirty pictures, and thus the good of keeping such pictures from them, was even more “evident.” The Right was in ascendancy, and a rump caucus of feminists had singled out pornography not only as the cause of sexual violence to women but as a species of sexual violence in itself. The commission was chaired by conservative attorney general Edwin Meese and stacked with fundamentalist preachers, Republican prosecutors, vice cops, and antiporn activists. And while the lion’s share of the testimony it heard concerned adult materials and consumers (and found no solid evidence of harm), the commission pitched it’s pro-restriction recommendations to popular fears about children: “For children to be taught by these materials that sex is public, that sex is commercial, and that sex can be divorced from any degree of affection, love, commitment, or marriage,” the report read, “is for us the wrong message at the wrong time.”
The Meese commission lent new legitimacy to the idea that pornography causes harm, especially to children, and since it’s hearings that notion has mushroomed, morphing into the suspicion that exposing any explicit sexual information can hurt them. In recent years, whether the target was nude photos in museum exhibitions, contraceptive information on videotapes, or (according to one Florida pastor) the satanic Barney the Purple Dinosaur, censorship proponents have advertised nearly every assault on speech as a defense of children. Critics suspect that the Right’s true agenda is a radically conservative one: to scrub the public space clean of sexuality entirely. Artists and civil libertarians have resisted, but what was once controversial has become commonsensical. By the 1990s, commercial media all posted “harmful to minors” warnings before programs containing sexual language or images, and–a practice unheard of even a decade before and still considered ludicrous in Europe–American public art spaces routinely post similar advisories that an exhibition might be “inappropriate” for children. Many such exhibits display nothing more than paintings or sculptures of nudes. And, as we will see in the next chapter, the most sacrosanct subject of all is the representation of children’s own bodies.
The software came with names evoking caregivers (Net Nanny, CyberSitter) and cops (Cyber Patrol). The telecommunications bill, to which the CDA would have been an amendment, was also the first to propose the V-chip, a device to be installed in televisions that could screen out programs according to ratings coded for sex, vulgar language, violence, and so forth. Around that time, a New Yorker cartoon showed a computer scientist at her workstation, telling a colleague, “I have in mind a V-chip to be implanted directly in children.”
As the joke suggests, these people’s relief was misplaced. Sure, parents had a hand in deciding what movies their kids saw, what books they read, and what Web sites they visited. But they could not filter out all the “dirty” sex, even if they wanted to. And technology was not going to solve the problem, no matter how smart the programmers made it. For one thing, computer-savvy kids were smarter. One enterprising twelve-year-old A student programmed the computer to record his father’s keystrokes as he set up the filter, then deleted them, downloaded some porn, and sold it to his friends.38
Moreover, this artificial intelligence was about as discriminating as Senator James Exon, the Nebraska Democrat who sponsored the CDA. CyberSitter couldn’t tell the difference between the dirty word penis and the clean one any better than a person could. So the programs, and the people employed to scroll through the names of Web sites looking for potential offenders, erred on the far side of caution. America Online blocked the word breast until cancer patients complained they couldn’t get to their support groups and information sites. Cyber Patrol’s top-secret CyberNOT list banned Planned Parenthood sites, feminist, youth and gay sites, as well as free speech and Second Amendment sites and such “violent” information as that posted by the city of Hiroshima about its peace memorial. CyberSitter blocked the site of the National Organization for Women. The poet Anne Sexton and the Sussex County Fair were universally banned because of the spelling of their names, as were Christian sites advertising videos about sexuality. Even the allegedly more sensitive PICS (Platform for Internet Content Selection), software that employs a site-rating system and was recommended for schools and public libraries as well as homes, could leave kids “confined to a research world smaller than their school library,” attorney Heins pointed out, “because after all, the Encyclopedia Britannica has an entry on “contraception,’” a word that would give it the equivalent of an R or X rating. Nevertheless, by 1999, almost a third of online households had installed a filtering device on their computers. And in December 2000, unnoticed during the prolonged presidential postelections, Bill Clinton signed the Child Internet Protection Act (CIPA), requiring public libraries to filter their computers or lose federal funding; upon his assumption of the presidency, George W. Bush affirmed his commitment to Internet censorship. At this writing, the American Library Association and the ACLU have brought suit challenging CIPA’s constitutionality.
Opponents of government regulation of the Net usually maintain that parents, not the state, should decide what their kids see and read. But there are some adults who believe kids can make their own decisions. In Wired magazine, journalist Jon Katz argued that by accepting technological surrogates for government censorship under the Communications Decency Act, liberals had sold out their kids’ free-speech rights. Katz said he and his wife were concerned for their fourteen-year-old daughter’s safety, but they had also schooled her in media literacy and instilled moral intelligence, also known as conscience. In short, they trusted her. So the girl surged the Net unsupervised, discussing what she found there just as she’d discuss a movie or an event at school. If an uncomfortable or threatening situation arose, she was instructed to employ the tactic she learned in preschool: “Use your words.” The appropriate phrase for Internet creeps, said Katz, is “Get lost.”42
It is hard to say what children are “taught” by porn or any other sexual imagery or by words they encounter in the media. However, as testimony before the Lockhart commission suggested, many sexologists suspect that sexual information gleaned before a person can understand it either bores or escapes or possibly disgusts him or her but doesn’t hurt.43 The New Jersey mother of a ten-year-old told me her son asked out of the blue what a “rim job” was. When she answered him explicitly, she said, “He looked at me like, ‘Are you kidding?’” And then he said, “Oh,” and got out of the car and went to play soccer. He seemed fine after that.”
… censorship is not protection. Rather, to give children a fighting chance in navigating the sexual world, adults need to saturate it with accurate, realistic information and abundant, varied images and narratives of love and sex.
15 – Samuel S. Janus and Barbara E. Bess, “Latency: Fact or Fiction?” American Journal of Psychoanalysis 36, no. 4 (1976): 345-46.
22 – Anne C. Bernstein, Flight of the Stork: What Children Think (and When) about Sex and Family Building, rev. ed. (Indianapolis: Perspectives Press, 1994), 31.
23 – Elizabeth Kolbert, “Americans Despair of Popular Culture,” New York Times, August 20, 1995, 23.
30 – Mary R. Murrin and D. R. Laws, “The Influence of Pornography on Sexual Crimes,” Handbook of Sexual Assault, ed. W. L. Marshall, D. R. Laws, H. E. Barbaree (New York: Plenum Press, 1990), 83-84.
31 – David E. Nutter and Mary E. Kearns, “Patterns of Exposure to Sexually Explicit Material among Sex Offenders, Child Molesters, and Controls,” Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy 19 (spring 1993): 73-85.
32 – John Money, Love Maps: Clinical Concepts of Sexual/Erotic Health and Pathology, Paraphilia and Gender Transposition, Childhood, Adolescence and Maturity (New York: Irving Publishers, 1986); Irene Diamond, “Pornography and Repression: A Reconsideration,” Signs (summer 1989): 689; David Futrelle, “Shameful Pleasures,” In These Times (March 7, 1994): 17.
33 – Majorie Heins, Sex, Sin, and Blasphemy: A Guide to America’s Censorship Wars (New York: New Press, 1993).
38 – Morning Edition, National Public Radio, September 12, 1997.
42 – Jon Katz, “The Rights of Kids in the Digital Age,” Wired, July 1996.
43 – Report of the Surgeon General’s Workshop, 36-38.
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