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Levine, Judith, Harmful to Minors, The perils of protecting
children from sex, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis/London, 2002.
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Levine, Judith, The
Romance a Teenage Camper Couldn't Have Today Summer of Love, in: Village
Voice, by Judith Levine, Week of July 3 - 9, 2002, www.villagevoice.com
This is an innocent story. In 1967, the summer before my 15th birthday, I
fell in love. It was my first intense erotic love, and its object was the
photography counselor at camp -- a lean, bearded, blue-eyed guy I'll call
Jake. He was 26. Nothing sexual happened. Still, I think of those two months
as the summer of my panouissement, a French word meaning blossoming
or opening, which also means glow. Jake took hundreds of pictures of me, and
his affirmation and his camera opened me to myself. They helped me begin,
sexually, to glow.
If the same events had occurred in 2002, they would not be viewed as
innocent. The adults around me would write my chaste romance as a perverse
tale, casting Jake as a predator and me as his hapless, clueless prey. Had I
started my sex education with good-touch-bad-touch lessons in kindergarten
or listened for a decade to media reporting on a world allegedly crowded
with sexual malefactors sniffing the world for young flesh, I might even
have believed that my friend and mentor Jake was one of them. That sweet
idyll would have been, instead, the summer of my victimization. And instead
of opening me, Jake's attentions might have closed me down in fear and
confusion.
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Lerner, Sharon, Kids' Sexuality Finds a Champion --
and Conservatives Attack Underage and Under Siege, in: Village Voice, by
Sharon Lerner Week of July 3 - 9, 2002,
www.villagevoice.com
[..] Drawing on social science and history, Levine makes a strong case that
the denial of sexuality is the true cause of harm to minors. [..] Harmful
to Minors' most important contribution is tying that protective impulse
to adults' deep-rooted discomfort with their own sexuality. |
The joy of not having sex - yet,
26th January 2001, USA, source unknown
Just as every generation of teenagers acts as if it is the first to discover
sex, every generation of middle-aged adults acts as if it is the first to
discover that teenagers are having sex. Certainly the current generation of
middle-aged American adults is acting that way, since teen sex has become
something of a cultural preoccupation here.
The Washington Post ran a front-page story a year or two ago that chronicled the
sexual activities of a bunch of upper-middle-class 13-year-olds and reported
that a bacchanal of blow jobs was taking place behind the bike sheds. [...]
The report actually revealed that true love waits only for a little while -
teenagers who take the virginity pledge postpone sexual relations for, on
average, a few months longer than those who don't.
Taking the pledge had the biggest effect on teenagers aged between 15 and 17;
while 18-year-old pledgers ended up having sex around the same time as their
non-pledging peers. And pledgers, when they did eventually give it up, were less
likely to engage in safe sex.
Young, Michael & Geroge, Danny, Predictors
of virginity and recent sexual involvement among rural adolescents,
[USA, Abstract of a] lecture, given at the 15th World Congress os Sexology,
World association of Sexology, June 2001, Paris
The purpose of the study was to identify the role of educational aspirations,
self-esteem, and religion in early sexual involvement. To develop programs that
are effective in helping young people postpone sexual involvement, it is
important to identify the antecedents of such involve- ment.
In other statements we mention:
Gieles, Frans, 'Harmful
to Minors' - The
perils of protecting children from sex
Lecture about the book of Judith
Levine, Harmful
for Minors, The perils of protecting children from sex, 2001, University of
Minnesota Press, Minneapolis / London
Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 1 November 2002; Study conference 'Aljen
Klamer group', Paul' s Church, "Abuse by definition? Image and
reality"
Protecting
children from sex is dangerous, says Levine in the subtitle.
To say this is also dangerous in contemporary USA.
Kerkhof, Martijn P.N. van, Jany
Rademakers about children's sexuality: 'Sexual
Experience Makes Youths More Liberal' - translated
from 0-25, oktober 1999
Dutch young people usually start with sex if they are ripe for
it. 'They learn that partners have to negotiate with each other', says
developmental psychologist Jany Rademakers.
'Unquestionably, children have sexual feelings. People refuse to believe it.
But the three basic elements of sexuality - gender, intimacy, and having a
body - appear to be of great importance in children's lives,'
'Parents have much influence on the development of sexual feelings, positively
as well as negatively.'
'I think that boys strongly need to talk with a man about the filling in of
their masculinity.'
'Dutch youngsters have fourteen year time to experience with their sexuality.'
'I do not exclude that boys are from nature more directed to sex.'
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