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Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from
by Judith Levine
University of Minnesota Press
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Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex, by Judith Levine (University of Minnesota Press, $26.95, 299 pages)

Judith Levine's Harmful to Minors has certainly stirred the already turbulent waters of children and sexuality. Calm, thoughtful, insightful, and intellectually vigorous, Levine's book is a model of how to present a topic that sends most people­ and the media­ over the edge. The problem­ as Levine and her publishers found out [see pages 9-10]­ is that it's nearly impossible in the West today to discuss children's or teen's sexuality and eroticism with any rationality or respect for dissenting views.

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Levine's thesis­ so self-evident as to be mundane­ is that children are sexual beings whose sexuality faces constant and vigorous repression from the adult world. Most of the time the rhetoric of this repression takes the forms that children have to be "protected"­ from adults, violence, themselves, sex, and most everything else. Levine contends that this "protection" hurts children far more then it helps them.

But there's another aspect to Levine's book that is eye-opening, even for self-admitted sex-radicals, and which has not been noted in the media. The cold, hard, and undeniable facts is that being poor in America is an enormous negative factor for nearly all aspects of the sexual autonomy, knowledge, and health of youngsters.

Nearly a third of black urban gay men are HIV-positive. A child whose parents make less than $15,000 a year is 18 more times more likely to be sexually abused at home than one from a family with an income of above $30,000. More than 80 percent of teen mothers come from poor homes, while 75 percent of pregnant high-income teens get abortions so they can go to college and have careers before having families, only thirty-nine percent of poor and 54 percent of low-income teens terminate unplanned pregnancies. Runaway teens show HIV infection rates of nearly ten percent. In the 1990s more than half of New York City's HIV population were IV drug users who were marginally employed and housed.

So often in the discussions of how terrible the right-wing backlash is to sexual liberation the rhetoric comes down to the slogan that sex is good and repression is bad. But that's only part of a larger picture. Levine's book is valuable for showing not just the extent of institutionalized sexual repression, but how the terrible effects fall mainly on the poor.

It's all very well to talk about sexual freedom­ but like most things, it's a lot easier to get if you can afford it. And for many people­ especially kids­ the price is still too high.

Editor's Note: See our news slant Burn first for more coverage of this issue.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com