by Judith Levine
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Product Description
Now available in paperback, Judith Levine's controversial book challenges American attitudes towards child and adolescent sexuality-especially attitudes promulgated by a Christian right that has effectively seized control of how sex is taught in public schools. The author-a thoughtful and persuasive journalist and essayist-examines the consequences of "abstinence" only education and its concomitant association of sex with disease, and the persistent denial of pleasure. She notes the trend toward pathologizing young children's eroticized play and argues that Americans should rethink the boundaries we draw in protecting our children from sex. This powerful and illuminating work was nominated for the 2003 Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
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Average Customer Review:
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 Redefining The Norm and/or Telling It Like It Is, 2008-08-28
The cover and title itself, at first glance, could lead one to believe this was another in a long line of Oprah-esque literary campaigns designed to scare the crap out of our kids not to mention us....their parents!
Unprecedented in it's examination of past as well as current issues of Childhood Sexuality as well as an almost non-debatable presentation of facts, legal and/or otherwise, this is proving to be the benchmark of books on this delicate subject.
To her credit Judith Levine has taken the proverbial 'Slings and Arrows' for daring to write "Harmful to Minors" and will probably spend the better part of her career defending it's position. This reviewer never thought a book like this could ever be written much less published and I never thought I would be able to say this but ` It's about g*# damn time!'
This is coming from a proud parent and a loyal son. Now before some of you go off on some wild tangent about `sexualizing our kids' understand this. Sex and experimentation happens whether we want to believe it or not. It happens at various ages with various ages at various times in various places with various people. One of the `Bromides' I've always lived by is `I don't care who's wrong or right, I care what's wrong or right!' and after reading her book on this subject, I have come to the conclusion that Judith Levine is RIGHT! I am a proud father of two girls and I am both my girl's `Daddy'. Levine's common sense attitude, backed by her meticulous research of facts will find readers asking questions they were either afraid to or refused to ask before. As expected it had its early detractors. Those detractors could do nothing to prove her wrong. They operated with scare tactics and no facts. What a real 'Halloween Coalition' her detractors turned out to be. The extremists of both parties have trashed Levine. People from America's 'Far Right Wing', including it's most vocal ally, the Christian Right's very own 'Eva Braun', Dr. Laura Schlessinger, to the far Left Wing represented by a cavalcade of forgettable names, closely associated with the frigid/asexual/female chauvinist wing of the radical feminist movement. There hasn't been an alliance of this `weirdness' since the 1992 Anti-GAT/NAFTA campaign!
Ironically what I appreciated first was what I appreciated the most; The Title. A passerby catching a glance of just the books title would certainly come to the conclusion that it was some Pseudo-Clinical study of childhood sexual encounters, chocked full of stories of molestation and violence and predictably backed up by law-enforcement statistics proving things like the site of an exposed female breast to anyone under the age of 18 (check your local jurisdictions for Age-Of Consent) will cause that person to become a sexual predator, a deviant, a nymphomaniac or perhaps even go blind.
After delving into it one finds that it is anything but a scare mongering, painfully statistical treatise. While Oprah Winfrey, Pat Robertson and others continue ranting, all the while, steeped in the paranoia of `group-think and waiting for the call to go on the next witch hunt, you may want to take your hopefully open mind into an area not talked about much these days; The positive effects of childhood sexuality. While not an endorsement for `sex for any age with anyone' she does make an excellent and seemingly airtight case for a relaxation of certain `Prurient American ' sex-laws and attitudes. She also thankfully promotes a long overdue examination of our antiquated thoughts and ideas about sex as it relates to our children. It also may be one of the cleverest title-ings for a non-fiction work in the last 20 years. Whether or not you get the 'dipped in sarcasm' humor of the title you will, if read with an open mind, get a sense of the current state of childhood sexuality with it's almost 'Stalinistic' roundups and persecutions of caring parents and bright kids. She provides a common sense approach to dealing with issues of masturbation, sexual experimentation, child/child contact, adult/child contact and fear of sex as it relates to our views as adults. Reviled in some sectors, revered in others, Levine's major accomplishment is perhaps the one thing she didn't foresee. With the release of `Harmful To Minors: The Perils of Protecting Your Children From Sex', she has cracked open the door to a long over-due dialogue on sex and has done so in a way that forces us to face it, discuss it and finally deal with it.... and that my friends, is the most important thing of all.
Mike D.Jones, Sacramento, California
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Keep premarital sex safe and legal!, 2008-08-23
This excellent book provides the ammunition needed in the fight against those that wish to raise the age of sexual consent to 21. Already thousands of children and adolescents have been forced to register as sexual offenders for committing harmless acts such as groping or even pre-marital kissing.
Is consensually kissing someone a couple years under an arbitrary age of consent is really "sinful"? Is it really the job of government to punish this sin with a lifetime sentence?
All thinking people must not fall for the absurd "save the children from sin" bandwagon movement that is spreading sexual dysfunction and fascism. A fascist police state becomes absolutely necessary when the age of consent is higher than puberty. The natural age of consent is puberty. The ultimate goal of the child purity movement is to outlaw premarital sex. Outlawing premarital sex will criminalize far too many of those that we claim to want to protect.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
The most important book I've read so far this year., 2008-05-30
Judith Levine, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex (University of Minnesota Press, 2002)
I have read, over the years, a handful of books that I consider to be truly important, books that look at a particular aspect of our society, how it has damaged us (perhaps irreparably), and how we might change facets of our culture to stop further damage, and maybe heal some of the damage that's already been done-- Stanton Peele's The Diseasing of America, Gina Kolata's Rehtinking Thin, Philip K. Howard's The Death of Common Sense, and a few others. It's a very short list, mostly because these are books that do not fit in with the prevailing norms in the least. These are books that are unafraid to take a stand against the stupidity of our current culture. They are unpopular, and it's very hard to get them published. That, of course, makes them all the more important. And of them, perhaps, Judith Levine's Harmful to Minors is the most important. While all of them address very important topics, this one attacks the most wide-reaching subject I've found in one of these books: how America's puritanical attitude towards sex has resulted in generations of increasingly oversheltered, and dangerously uninformed, children, and how that oversheltering and lack of information have pushed America to the brink of disaster and allowed a number of social ills (of which AIDS is only the most visible) to fester unchecked.
When I started thinking about how to write this review, the obvious place to start, it seemed, would be with an extended quote from the book. Problem is, I couldn't come up with just one quote; so much of this book needs to be quoted, so much of what Levine has to say needs said, that singling out one or two paragraphs from the book seemed to be doing the rest of it a disservice. With one short exception (we'll get to that later), the entire book is quotable. Obviously, reprinting a 270-page book does not make for a good review, and yet if I could have done so here, I'd have done it in a heartbeat; this is a book that every American parent, or anyone who was raised in the increasingly oppressive anti-child culture that began to foment in the 1950s, desperately needs to read. Some will find validation in these pages that their embarrassing, socially unacceptable, or "morally repugnant" thoughts are universal. Some will come to understand that their beliefs about how they should be parenting their children are shared by many others. The majority, I think, will find that they are not alone, or nearly as rare as they had believed. It's the people whose voices have caused all these insane "protect the children" laws to be enacted who are in the minority; they just scream louder and know what buttons to press. When Levine traces the raft of onerous laws involving day-care workers (especially male day-care workers) not being allowed to show affection to children to the long-discredited McMartin case, the obvious reaction is, "well, since none of that actually happened, why do we still have the laws?" Indeed. And yet, somehow, we do.
I was prepared to stick this book far atop my list of best reads of the year for 2008, despite us being less than five months into the year, before I hit the epilogue. Levine stumbles a bit at the very end of the book; where she spent the majority of the book completely on-point, in the epilogue she suddenly starts lashing out at things that seem to have nothing to do with her thesis, drawing the most tenuous of connections at best. But this is in no way to say that the rest of the book is not well worth your time; in fact, were I drawing up a curriculum of must-read books for every American, this would most certainly be on it.
Children, especially those who are suffering between the onset of puberty and the so-called "magic age" at which we are all supposed to gain maturity overnight, are the last subclass of people it is considered socially acceptable to repress in America. Judith Levine is outraged by this, as we all should be, and Harmful to Minors is the result. The trouble she had getting the book published, which she recounts in the prologue, should set off major warning bells to everyone reading it. This is a deeply, deeply important book, and I strongly suggest you read it as soon as you possibly can. For in the six years since its release, not surprisingly, things have only gotten worse. The arm is already lopped off; the more of us who read this book, understand the consequences of our culture's actions, and speak up about them, the better a chance we have to stanch the bleeding. For if we don't, the patient may not survive the operation. **** ½
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Incredibly Important Book, 2008-02-07
I would say this is one of the 5 most important books I've read in my life.
Finally...FINALLY someone has the courage to stand up and say what needs to be said. Our society is dysfunctional. Parents don't know how to talk about sex and earn their children's trust in sexual matters. They pass their ignorance and fear right down to the next generation. Children who do not trust their own parents are definitely more vulnerable to abuse from others, especially when they learn to trust others.
There is so much hysteria, paranoia and flat out ignorance about sex in America. It is astounding!!!
The controversy that this book generated is mostly due to the repressive, morally righteous environment in this country. But Ms. Levine is also sex-positive. She goes beyond simply providing objective information about sex or our dysfunctional ways of dealing with it, she actually advances many of her own opinions about the positive nature of sex and the negative consequences of repression.
To me, sex raises many questions. I don't have all the answers. The only criticism I could make of the book is that Ms. Levine is a little too opinionated and like a race horse at the starting gate. She comes on a little strong for the majority of Americans, many of whom are still struggling to understand how people can be gay. I'm sure many of these people are not yet able to fathom that children can enjoy and benefit from sex with adults. So that part created a lot of controversy.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Harmful to Minors, 2008-01-28
I'm almost all the way done, and I absolutely adore this book. The author sets up and supports very firm arguments against the neo-cons and overprotective parents who seek to push their morality on the rest of the nation. This is a must-read for those who wish to understand how our system got to be the mess it is today concerning sex.
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