Harmful to Minors: The Academy's Sex Abuse Problem
In which I look at a book by Levine called "Harmful to Minors," which is the precursor for disgraced former Mermaids trustee, Jacob Breslow's ideas about sexuality.
This article is ostensibly about a book by Levine called: Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex. But I have chosen this topic to act as a warning about how to spot boundary-blurring and grooming, even when it’s wrapped in a progressive flag. Language matters. If we are not vigilant, it can very easily become a Trojan horse for all sorts of bad ideas.
In 2002, University of Minnesota Press published Levine’s book. The central tenet of the work is that sex is not in and of itself harmful to minors, and that the drive to protect children from sexuality often does them more harm than good. Harmful to Minors is not only about paedophilia. It situates that topic in the context of issues surrounding abortion, gender, poverty, education, AIDs, gender, abstinence-only sex education, statutory rape laws, and so on.
The trouble with Levine’s argument is that if you adopt her language, it sounds plausible.
For example, who could argue with the idea that young people deserve autonomy, privacy and pleasure, and the opportunity to develop their own identity? But if you look carefully at the language, you will realise that it is an attempt at grooming. What it actually means is that children are capable of consenting to sex with adults, without their parents knowledge. The first proposition (autonomy, privacy and pleasure for young people) seems obvious. It is in fact simply a trojan horse for the second.
For Levine there are two major “baddies.” Neither is particularly well defined. They are the “religious right” who, according to her, have been pushing back against “the sexual autonomy of young people” in a variety of ways since the 1970s. For example, increasing restrictions on abortion and contraception, and reducing “comprehensive sex education.” Again with the euphemisms. The “sexual autonomy of young people” is kids having sex (with adults). And given that there is, according to Levine, no harm to young people in showing them sexually explicit material, who knows what “comprehensive sex education” might mean.
The other problem in Levine’s world view are the feminists, those evil blue-stockings who have ushered in a society shot through from top to bottom with “overwhelming sexual protectionism.” Again with the euphemisms. What she means is legal and social boundaries that protect the vulnerable from sexual predation.
Levine also looks at the actual rates of certain types of offending versus parents’ fear of them. For example, even though only around 100 children are kidnapped and murdered by strangers each year, three quarters of parents are afraid of this happening to their children. Yes, she really does present this as a “gotcha.” She throws in fears of galloping child sex abuse, ritual abuse, and internet sexual predators, and attempts to show that these are unsupported by evidence. Yet somehow, elsewhere in the book, she wants to argue that children are having plenty of sex and everything is fine. It is as if there are two types of sex that children can have; one type is fine and great and “feels good,” (an idea that is “widely pathologized”), the other type hardly ever happens. To say she has an agenda is an understatement.
Levine claims that the ultimate hypocrisy is that of parents who, having enjoyed many and various sexual encounters in their youth, then attempt to control the sexuality of their children. This is a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do approach, which in Levine’s view is the absolute height of hypocrisy. Speaking for myself, I experienced horrific and ongoing sexual abuse as a child, and you are damn right I will protect my children from the same fate. This is not hypocrisy. This is me sayingI will protect my children in the way I should have been protected.
Levine believes that children need to think about “navigating the sexual world,” meaning adults need to fill it with “accurate realistic information and abundant, varied images and narratives of love and sex.” Who could argue with that? But again, the language is a Trojan horse. Who could fail to see that this would justify showing pornography to children? In fact, elsewhere Levine argues that children are not harmed by such exposure. Indeed, in Levine’s world view children are hardly harmed by being sexually abused. Children who have had sex with adults may report being harmed by it, but they may also report consenting to it and finding it pleasurable.
In Levine’s words, “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… often the sex is better than it would be with a peer who has as little skill as they do.” Framing it in these terms is a lie. I sought out sex with older men as a young teenager and I would have told you that it made me feel “grown up,” that I consented. In fact, I was simply experiencing hypersexuality, which is a very common after-effect of having been abused. I had simply adopted the language of my abusers; another common side effect of being groomed.
Breslow, late of Mermaids, got the argument regarding adult child sex directly from Levine, asking, “is it really that children or young people having sex is the problem? Or is it [the problem] the conditions under which that sex happens?” In the context of Levine’s work, what this means is that the issue for Breslow and Levine is not children having sex with adults, but the fact that disproportionately disadvantaged children bear the brunt of being misinformed about sex.
It is true that poverty correlates with various “sex related problems” such as AIDs. It is poverty, argues Levine, not paedophiles or pornography, that harms young people. This results in an “unfair distribution of sexual health and happiness.” The language becomes transparent if you add the phrase “amongst children” to the end of the sentence.
I could go into more detail. How evil feminists and the religious right join forces to categorise women as paragons of innocence without desire. How children can be capable of murder but not consent to sex. How the category of “children” who cannot consent to sex legally, including everybody from birth to eighteen, makes no sense to Levine. How most people have had sex by the end of their teens. How “depriving” children of the opportunity to “explore” will not result in them suddenly being sexually healthy adults at eighteen. In summary, you just need to know that Levine is tilting at windmills. She seems to think that the two alternatives are allowing adults to have sex with children and showing them porn on the one hand, and not touching children at all- even non-sexually- and depriving them of all knowledge until they reach the ago of majority. What a load of horseshit.
Levine also claims, "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 kids to be happy now and later, it is their duty, and should be their delight, to help them learn to love well, which is to say respectfully of others and themselves, skilfully in body and heart, morally as lovers, friends, and citizens.” Again with the language. It is grooming. It could quite happily be spouted by any of the people on the Mermaids message boards talking about getting anal beads for their children to “experiment” with.
Breslow starts where Levine left off. Alongside poverty, he announces a raft of other “conditions” that mean that it’s not adults having sex with children that’s the problem. “Is it that people are having it [sex] under conditions of anti-blackness, poverty, homophobia and transphobia and if those conditions were alleviated, the way we are talking about what we’re deeming the problem would then also change?” He’s less eloquent than Levine, less evidence based and less informed, but he uses the same Trojan horse techniques. “What we’re deeming the problem” is in fact adults having sex with minors. If racism, poverty, homophobia and transphobia were eradicated, perhaps, Breslow argues, the “problem” wouldn’t be such a problem any more. He stops short of calling people who campaign against paedophiles racist, anti-black, homophobic or transphobic, but it would not be too great a leap.
He also argues against the “production” of the sinister figure of the “sex offender.” This, he claims, is “produced” through the “carceral state.” Individuals who have sex with children are painted, in the media and in our collective imagination, as evil, harmful, deserving of death. But we should consider how that figure is “produced”, and how we sit with it, and how we can push back against not paedophiles, but the way in which they are painted in popular culture. “What do we do when queerness is aligned with projects (…) that are less respectable? What are the limits of who we see as being part of our project? (...) How do we sit with the category of the sex offender and make sure that we’re doing it in ways that push back against the production of that figure through the carceral state?” This is psudeo-academic hogwash masquerading as enlightened thought.
This world view seeks to established that racism, poverty, homophobia, transphobia and the carceral state are the problem, while moral actions such as including paedophiles in our projects, and pushing back against the “production” of the sex offender as a baddie are the sin.
Wrap it up in whatever flag you like, it’s boundary blurring, it’s grooming, and it knocks me sick. What is the greatest moral good in this universe? A twelve year old, wearing a G-A-Y top, dancing in front of a crowd of adults in such a hypersexual manner that several of the audience were obviously uncomfortable. Call me all the prudes and bluestockings you like, but I do not want to live in the moral upside down.
The worst thing is that Levine and Breslow are not writing in a vacuum. Somebody edited their work. Lots of somebodies attended those conferences. Somebody published it. For everybody willing to write their soft porn fantasises about a twelve year old, there are tens if not hundreds of others willing to actively enable, or at best, to turn a blind eye.
It will never be me. My mission, since I realised I had a mission in this debate at all, has been to educate and empower women to protect children. I hope this article has helped arm anybody who has read this far against being blinded by pseudo intellectual bullshit, when the actual aim is grooming.