aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Friday, June 30, 2006

Remembering Pariah

On the day that a judge extended the ruling that puts the new Georgia sex offender law on hold, it’s worth remembering a major article in Counter Punch from this past March, Sexual Fascism in Progressive America: Scapegoats and Shunning, authored by the pseudonymous “Pariah:”

The writer remains anonymous because he writes and is politically active in several completely unrelated social justice movements. He fears that the shunning and marginalization he describes for those who write about this topic could compromise (unfairly) his other work.

I quoted extensively from the article at the time, fearing that in modern freedom loving America it might disappear from the web. It’s still there, complete with this damning passage:

Even before Judith Levine’s Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex was published in 2002, a massive campaign by fundamentalist Christian groups, including Concerned Women for America, attacked the publisher, the University of Minnesota Press. While the book was published, the Press created a new process for reviewing its books before publication. Levine spoke publicly about how she was humiliated time and again in public. She said the manuscript for her book had been turned down by many publishers, treated as if it were “radioactive.” Among other insights, Levine wrote that “obsession with pedophiles stems for the reluctance to confront incest and the rampant sexualization of children” in American culture. “Adults project the eroticized desire outwards, creating a monster to hate, hunt down and destroy.” Of the outcry against her book she added, “What happened to me is a perfect example of the hysteria my book is about.”

After reading that passage I realized that I see no discussion anywhere of appropriate reaction to this society’s mainstream eroticization of youth; no notion of how one handles attraction appropriately. Denial is the order of the day. In this instance, denial is destructive.