Reading
I had a lot of time to read while I was on trains and airplanes recently, so I read the entirety of Harmful to Minors, by Judith Levine. Levine's book is dedicated to arguing that children's sexuality and sexual experience is legitimate and can be a positive thing, and that attempts to suppress it or pretend it doesn't exist can have negative consequences.
I was surprised at how much of the book was dedicated to discussions of sex education. The other surprise was Levine's insistence that childhood sexual experience is reasonable and appropriate. (Less radical advocates often suggest that childhood sexual education, knowledge, fantasy, desire, discussion, etc., are appropriate, but physical contact may not be. For example, many people I know think that young people should be able to view explicit discussions and depictions of sexual acts, if they want to, but not necessarily to participate physically in those acts themselves. Levine has a much more radical sex-positive view and does not seem to want to be held to a sharp distinction between ideas, images, and acts.)
She spends a great deal of time talking about safe sex and birth control, which reminds me of the passage in Summerhill where Neill seems to suggest that he can't allow the young students at his school to have intercourse because they might become pregnant -- but he doesn't necessarily see an abstract reason why they shouldn't do so otherwise. (Neill wrote in an era when birth control and abortion were less widely available, and less reliable, than they are now, to say nothing of their unpopularity. Maybe if birth control and abortion services had been readily available, Neill would have chosen to permit his students to have sexual intercourse! When I attended boarding school, I felt subjectively that the school's attempts to discourage sexual contact were less a result of concern about sexual morality or emotional development and more a result of concern about pregnancy. This is in line with Neill's suggestion that pregnancy was his greatest fear for his students; I suspect that many schools would turn more of a blind eye to older teens' sexual activity if the "outward consequences" of pregnancy and STDs could be eliminated.)
Since I had more interest initially in topics like Internet censorship, I regretted that Levine spent so little time on them. She also gave too little attention to questions of emotional development and maturity (what liberals often worry about when thinking about young people's sexual activity), since she had such a strong focus on dissing conservatives' moral anxieties and promoting safe sex and sex-positive attitudes.
What do young people in the U.S. actually believe about sexuality, and why? What are the influences of religious and political belief, educational background, social class, temperament, personal and family experience? (There are many anecdotes about young people's beliefs, but usually in the service of some particular argument. And the statistics provided are more often about behaviors than about attitudes and beliefs. I wanted to know more about what sexuality means to people, a question Levine sometimes seemed to be neglecting.)
I also re-read From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, a children's book I'd read in elementary school. I think I found it more plausible, and more exciting, the first time around, although there are some parts which continue to be touching.
I'm now working on Lakoff's Moral Politics, which I got as a birthday present; I'll write more about that when I finish it. I've also borrowed some interesting books from Amy, and I'm hoping to keep working on Personal Knowledge, which I put aside a while back.
