The Wonder Years (Page 2)

Still, I think Levine would be pilloried by Dr. Laura and her ilk even without the priest scandal and even if she had ignored the subject of sex across the age divide. For the pleasure principle she enunciates challenges the twenty-five-year-old organizing strategy of the right. Ever since Anita Bryant first demonstrated that a power base could be built by attacking homosexuals, the right has exploited real anxieties about sex, love and family to constrain the liberatory spirit, whether expressed by sexual preference, divorce, abortion, contraception, women's freedom or teen sex. This has not managed to send queers back to the closet, lower divorce rates or "protect the children." American teenagers have about four times the pregnancy rate of teens in Western Europe. Those in a program of "abstinence only" education still have sex and are about half as likely to protect themselves than kids who've received broad sex information. Even with abortion rights severely curtailed, US teenagers have abortions at about the rate they did just after Roe v. Wade. One in four has had a sexually transmitted disease; one an hour is infected with HIV; and, not incidentally, among American children one in six is poor. That notwithstanding, the sex panic strategy has succeeded in the only way it had to: creating a movement, with all the institutions, political power, lawmaking capability, grassroots presence and funding that implies, to advance an agenda for everything from global dominance to bedroom snooping. Levine's critics are all part of that project, and since she butts against it almost from the opening pages of her book, they are striking back.

What is more telling is who isn't rushing to the defense. While a group of free-speechers, pro-sex feminists and radical gay activists have generated press releases, opinion pieces, e-mail alerts and letters of support to Levine's publisher, there has been silence from mainstream feminist organizations and the liberal sex-education and child-health establishments. That may be partly because they, too, have felt the sting of Levine's criticism. Rather than build a countermovement to insist on sexual freedom, she writes, such heavyweights as Planned Parenthood, the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, ETR Associates (the largest US mainstream sex-ed publisher), the National Education Association, the Health Information Network and a host of progressive sex educators tried to appropriate the "family values" rhetoric of the right, joining in "a contest to be best at preventing teen sex."

"The Right won," she writes, but the mainstream let it. Comprehensive sex educators had the upper hand in the 1970s, and starting in the 1980s, they allowed their enemies to seize more and more territory, until the Right controlled the law, the language, and the cultural consensus.... Commenting on its failure to defend explicit sexuality education during an avalanche of new HIV infection among teenagers, Sharon Thompson [author of the engrossing book on sex and love among teenage girls, Going All the Way] said, "We will look back at this time and indict the sex-education community as criminal. It's like being in a nuclear power plant that has a leak, and not telling anybody."

Throughout the Clinton era those forces largely stood by as the most sexually reckless President in memory signed a sheaf of repressive legislation, acts with names like Defense of Marriage, Abstinence Only, Personal Responsibility and Child Pornography Protection. The last on that list, capping a legal trend that, as Levine says, "defined as pornography pictures in which the subject is neither naked, nor doing anything sexual, nor...is even an actual child," was recently struck down by the Supreme Court. The second to last, also known as the welfare bill, is up for reauthorization this year, along with its enhancements of penalties for statutory rape and its policing of teen sex, motherhood and marriage. As part of that bill the Clintonites fanned the notion that minors were too young to consent to sex with an adult, while in criminal law they eased the way for prosecuting children as adults and jailing them as adults, in which circumstance consent usually isn't an issue. To grasp the effect of liberal silence about Levine, it is perhaps enough to recall one name: Dr. Joycelyn Elders, sacked by Clinton as Surgeon General in 1994 for saying that masturbation is part of childhood and it doesn't hurt to talk about it. Elders has written an eloquent and sensible foreword to Harmful to Minors. Back when Elders was twisting in the wind ABC's Cokie Roberts called her "a sort of off-to-the-left, out-of-the-mainstream, embarrassing person"; now the Washington Times insinuates she's soft on molestation. From self-abuse to child abuse in eight years, one absurd charge prepares the ground for the other.

That said, it's too easy to read the reception of Levine's book as simply more evidence of right-wing lunacy and liberal retreat. What the brouhaha also signals in its small way is a failure of the left. In organizing around issues of sex, love and family, the right has surely been cynical but at least it speaks to the deepest questions of intimate life. Its answers are necessarily simplistic and straitened. The family is falling apart? It's the homos. Marriage seems impossible? It's the libbers. Sex brings suffering? Just say No. Love seems distant? Await the Rapture. Except for a small group of queer radicals and pro-sex feminists, to the extent that such questions are even entertained on the left, the answers tend toward a mixture of social engineering and denial: There's nothing wrong with the family that an equitable economy, divorce or gay marriage won't fix. Marriage is possible; equality is the key. If sex ed was better and condoms were free, teens wouldn't get pregnant and wouldn't get AIDS. If abortion is painful, you've been propagandized. If sex is painful, you're doing it wrong. If love is painful, find a new lover.

Levine is too sensitive to the mysteries and complexities of human relations to be characterized as advocating anything so pat as happiness-through-policy in the area of childhood sexuality. But if her putting children and sex together in the same sentence can be read by the right as a call to licentiousness, her heavy emphasis on the pleasure-enhancing possibilities of sex education may encourage readers on the left to believe that kids can be protected from bad sex, mediocre sex, regret, risk, danger, pain. And they can't, any more than adults can. They can't because in matters of sex, desire is a trickster. What you see isn't always what you get, much less what you want, though it may be what you need. In matters of the heart, intimacy means vulnerability means daring to bet against pain. As with all bets, sometimes, often, you lose.

Levine actually makes this point but she so wants kids to have better information, better experiences--and she argues so well and hard for these--that somehow it gets lost. Citing a study showing that 72 percent of teenage girls who'd had sex wished they had waited, Levine wonders whether this regret isn't perhaps really about romantic disappointment and asks, "Might real pleasure, in a sex-positive atmosphere, balance or even outweigh regret over the loss of love?" Can we know pleasure without pain? one might ask in return. Can regret over lost love, at any age, be so easily balanced? Even sidestepping those twisting lines of inquiry, isn't the promise of "real pleasure" as much a romantic ideal, as much an invitation to disappointment, as the promise of true love, especially for the young? However wished, it's not so easy to disentangle sex from the hope for love, to revel in pure, transporting sensuality without letting expectations, not to mention fumbling technique, get in the way. It doesn't have to, and it doesn't always, but sex can change everything between two people. We are weak, after all, and life's little joke is that in that weakness lies the potential for our ecstasy and our despair.

This isn't to discount the lifesaving value of open education about sex, condoms, desire, freedom. (And because discussions like this always force one to state the obvious, I'll also note that nothing in the foregoing should suggest that I oppose equality, economic redistribution, abortion rights, child safety, sexual liberation, the search for love or, so long as heterosexuals insist on having the state sanction their unions via the marriage contract, divorce and gay marriage.) But rather than promise kids a world of good sex--like promising a world of happy marriages, monogamous fulfillment, self-sustaining nuclear families--maybe it's more helpful to explain sex as the sea of clear water, giddy currents, riptides, sounding depths and rocky shoals that it is. You navigate, find wonder in the journey, scrape yourself up, press on anyway and survive. And sometimes, sometimes, you experience a bliss beyond expression. The political job is to expand the possibilities for such experience, to free people to navigate, help them survive the hurt or not hurt so bad. Maybe if we could be honest about sex, we could be honest about marriage and monogamy and family. Maybe if so much didn't hinge on an outsized faith in pleasure and fidelity and romantic love--if for people in couples or families, everything didn't depend on the thin reed of love, and for people alone, coupledom wasn't held out as the apex of happiness--all the talk we hear about community might actually mean something. The greatest virtue in Levine's book is its hope that children might learn to find joy in the realm of the senses, the world of ideas and souls, so that when sex disappoints and love fails, as they will, a teenager, a grown-up, still has herself, and a universe of small delights and strong hearts to fall back on.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.