Youth is beauty. Youth is desirable. Youth is one of those traits we appreciate most after we've lost them. The further removed we get from it, the more time and money we're willing to spend to approximate it. You know all this. You probably live it. But this being the model issue, I feel justified to remind the reading voyeuristic public that we live in an unfair hypocritical world, and one of the greatest hypocrisies of our time is the way we treat youth and sexuality: we see youths as sex objects, but we refuse to let them be sexual subjects. They must be appealing enough for us but not for themselves. They are attractive to us but we shouldn't be to them. In short, we like our youth deaf, blind, and mute; and predictably radiant, like the mirror of the evil Queen in the Snow White tale.

What reminded me of this moral cowardice is the controversy surrounding the publication of a book called Harmful to Minors. At a time when no less than the Pope is worried about sex between grownups and kids, along comes a book that says the whole business is much ado about very little: that so long as the kid is a teen, and not already emotionally damaged, no long-term harm is done. Even though it's a niggling portion of the book, the chapter on inter-generational sex has become its infamous synopsis. The author, Judith Levine, and the publisher, University of Minnesota Press, an academic house noted for its English language publications of European philosophy, are generally being viewed as child molesters themselves. As a result of the media hoopla, the state legislature has withdrawn funding for the press, forcing it to review its manuscript acceptance procedure.

Conservatives targeted the book, even before reading it, as the manifesto of liberal sex education's apocalyptic agenda, or, worse, as a shill for NAMBLA (the North American Man/ Boy Love Association). Radio moralizer Laura Schlessinger has been daily warning her audience that leftists are advocating sex between generations to the detriment of all morality (disregarding her own affair with a radio personality thirty years her elder when she was twenty nine and liked doing beaver shots for the Polaroid).

Harmful to Minors doesn't advocate anything between adults and teens, but it does make an effort to "correct" misconceptions where child sexuality is concerned, such as making the distinction between hebophilia (lust for teens) as opposed to pedophilia, which the book condemns as immoral and rightfully illegal. Levine argues that teens can give sexual consent, have done so for centuries, and are able to do so in most of the world. Even in this country, the idea that a sixteen year old shouldn't have sex with a twenty three year old is a very new judgment, one that coincides ironically with viewing teens as sex icons, both in the fashion industry and pop culture. At the same time our images publicize teen sensuality as a fact of life, our laws perpetuate consensual sex with a teen as statutory rape. Age of consent laws were made in the nineteenth century to curb prostitution, so that girls could work in sweatshops instead of on their backs. Levine shows that behavior considered "worrisome" in America is "unremarkable someplace else in the world."

Levine suggests that teens having sex with older partners are thoughtfully choosing erotically and emotionally experienced people who can handle the sex and its emotional hangover with more wisdom and kindness than their teen peers. Unfortunately the only anecdotes that come to public attention are nightmares of incest and rape or tales of teachers and students in which there's an unhealthy imbalance of power. The hundreds of thousands of perfectly happy anecdotes of inter-generational affairs are left on the living room floors of gossip sessions among friends. I've heard dozens of them, and even when they include a tearful memory, it's the memory of a first failed romance. My own adolescent inter-generational experiences were both beneficial and fun.

Levine's most controversial idea is pretty mainstream, and self-evident, so long as it isn't your own kid:  as soon as a child can have an orgasm, s/he should, often, alone or with others, with pleasure and reciprocation instead of guilt. Contrary to the misrepresentation that has caused chains like Barnes & Noble to refuse to carry it, Harmful to Minors doesn't promote sex between adults and children.  It prescribes masturbation and oral sex among teens as a natural alternative to intercourse. (I mention this in case a B&N exec is reading here, he can still be horrified.)  The book is not written heatedly enough to be a gutsy manifesto on behalf of anything. It plods along when it needs to rev up, and doesn't when it needs to pause for discussion of an important issue, such as the rehab of pedophiles, which Levine says occurs, contrary to public opinion. Basically Levine argues that the damage to teens from inter-generational sex has been overstated while the damage to teens from not respecting their natural sexual urges has been buried.  Once the human body can reproduce ("old enough to bleed, old enough to breed" goes the clich), it has the inherent urge to do so. 

Religious right organizations like Sex Respect propagate that "Sadness, not happiness, causes teen sex", that essentially sex before marriage is a form of self-destruction. They claim that teen pregnancy is down because of abstinence programs, and not as a result of sex education's emphasis on contraception. They assume responsibility toward the young means lying to them. They're even targeting Kinsey and Masters & Johnson's research, which documented long ago that toddlers have sexual feelings. The Freedom from Sex chant is one of the most goofy ad campaigns the sex police could have thought up for the simple fact that even if teens aren't active, they aren't free from the urge to be. 

The reason your parents demanded the right to enter your room at all times when you were a kid was to prevent you from whacking off.  If you were caught, or your porn stash uncovered, you were labeled, tearfully or contemptuously, a pervert, since only sick kids liked to look at other people nude or having sex. It didn't stop you from whacking off, it just made you feel bad about it. It taught you sex is a taboo and a source of shame. Levine's book is a small but courageous step to shed light where there's always more than enough heat. All of us who remember being fifteen, and suffering rather than relishing our hormonal attacks, and fumbling through the dark tunnel of ignorance and secrecy to find a way to our sexuality, as if no one had been on that path before, and who were never guided by someone with experience and understanding, owe it to the confused youths we once were to eradicate the double standard, to be positive and informative, to end any fear of sex because there's nothing there to fear. This is why I write this monthly column.