Вредно для несовершеннолетних

As in the Rind attack, politicians got into the act. Republican House Majority Leader Tom DeLay introduced a resolution calling on former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders to remove her preface from the book (unsurprisingly, Dr. Elders felt no inclination to oblige the conservative members of Congress). A New York City Councilman from Queens introduced his own resolution denounc­ing the book. But it was local politicians in the Press’s home state who had the greatest effect and reaped the greatest benefit. Minnesota House Majority Leader Tim Pawlenty, who was also vying for the GOP’s gubernatorial nomination, condemned Harmful to Minors as “disgusting,” and “an endorsement of child molestation.” He got more than 50 legislators to demand that the University suppress the book’s publication. With alerts on the Christian Right Web sites, hundreds of e-mails and calls poured into the Press’s office supporting this demand. None of these people had read the book, which was not yet available. When a protest at the university president’s house drew only a few participants, its organ­izer, the lone member of his own political party, undertook a hunger strike (reliable sources observed him drinking a canned protein shake, after which I called him my dieting striker).

For some of my attackers, though, ordinary political activism did not suffice. In the heat of that cool spring month, I received a death threat. A university policewoman told me that her colleagues were doing all they could to track down the owner of the hotmail ac­count. But the writer was too far away and appeared too disorgan­ized to carry out any promises. His missive, originating in the aptly named Escondido, California, was addressed to “that woman who wrote the book” and e-mailed in care of the Press. Not to fret, the officer assured me. This was a “benign death threat.”

In the end, the University administration yielded to the legisla­ture’s pressure and instituted an outside review of the University of Minnesota Press’s editorial practices. The review was more than vin­dicating: UMP’s standards were found to equal those at other univer­sity presses and in some instances were deemed “more rigorous than most.” But the effects of the attack are likely to linger anyway. Just as the American Psychological Association’s surrender emboldened Bruce Rind’s attackers to go after me, the University of Minnesota’s acquiescence in my case is likely to encourage other smear campaigns and censorship threats.¹ Commercial publishers, who shied away from the book on the first round, will only be more squeamish about similarly controversial titles. The Christian conservative organiza­tions, whose public profiles had lately flattened, enjoyed a momen­tary spike of attention. And Tim Pawlenty’s career soared. He was elected governor of Minnesota in 2002, from which office he is over­seeing massive cuts to the state’s higher-education budget.

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.

What happened to us all was more deliberate, orchestrated, and sophisticated than hysteria. We were the targets of a campaign pros­ecuted by sexual ideologues and political opportunists for whom the incitement of hysteria is only one tactic. I knew the histories of these campaigns—Harmful to Minors tells them. But every book publication teaches the author something she didn’t learn in writing the book. My lesson, as the object of what I’d written about, was an intimate knowledge of the way anti-sex campaigns work.

Distortion

Here’s how Sean Hannity of Fox News’ TV mudslinger Hannity & 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.