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When asked to explain the «firestorm of controversy» (as everyone called it) around Harmful to Minors, I always answered that the book was about the American hysteria over children's sexuality and this attack was an example of the same hysteria.

But hysteria is the wrong word. Hysteria—irrational fear, panic, exaggerated rage—surely moved many of the letter-writers and my would-be assassin. But hysteria implies something more anarchic and unconsciously motivated than what happened to me, or to Rind or SIECUS, or before us to sex researchers, educators, and advocates from Margaret Sanger to Alfred Kinsey to Joycelyn Elders— indeed, from the original modern proponent of «normalizing» children's sexuality, Sigmund Freud, to the public school teacher who utters the word clitoris in a seventh-grade classroom.

Distortion

Here's how Sean Hannity of Fox News' TV mudslinger Hannity and Colmes quoted Harmful to Minors : «We relish our erotic attraction to children.»

This is what Harmful to Minors says: «We relish our erotic attraction to children, says [literary critic James] Kincaid. ... But we also find that attraction abhorrent.» Not only does the book extensively discuss this contradiction, I was quoting somebody else.

In a petition for the suppression of Harmful to Minors to Minnesota's then-governor, Jesse Ventura, Jim Hughes of Survivors And Victims Empowered (SAVE) wrote: «Levine's previous work provides us a clue to her pro-pedophile thinking...She describes men this way: Men's sexuality is mean and violent, and men so powerful that they can 'reach WITHIN women to...construct us from the inside out.' Satan-like, men possess women, making their wicked fantasies and desires women's own. A woman who has sex with a man therefore, does so against her will, 'even if she does not feel forced.' »

Actually, this passage, from my first book, My Enemy, My Love, is a quotation from someone else too. The characterization of men's sexuality comes from the propaganda of a group called Women Against Sex, which I describe as representing «the most extreme edge of an already marginal politics.» I also call them «nutty.»

Selective quotation, exaggeration, and outright lies are time-honored tactics of the Right. Judith Reisman has long circulated the calumny that Alfred Kinsey conducted sexual experiments on infants at his institute; she offers no substantiation. Focus on the Family routinely refers to sex-ed curricula as «pornography.» For decades, sex-ed opponents have broadcast rumors of teachers disrobing in the classroom and children molding genitals out of clay. In Talk About Sex , sociologist Janice M. Irvine calls these «depravity narratives,» tales that strain credibility one by one, but in great enough numbers stir suspicion that something like them must be true. Would I actually molest my niece and nephew? A listener might dismiss that insinuation as too extreme. But a person like me who wrote a book like that might do something almost as bad—such as condoning molestation.