We digress again from the ongoing impeachment tele-novela aired live from the Senate. The "show" has somehow lost its excitement and educational value as the outcome is becoming more and more predictable and the unpreparedness of the prosecution is getting more evident. Even some senator-judges are already impatient and bored. So let us turn our attention to the other function of Congress concerning enactment of laws which is its main task anyway. And this has something to do again with some harmful and dangerous provisions of the RH bill now being considered in both houses.

These provisions specifically refer to the proposed mandatory classroom based sex education in private and public schools where classroom teachers who may not be competent at all are tasked to teach their pupils as young as ten years old, lessons in sexuality, sexual rights, and reproductive health. While the bill also mentions lessons in values, more emphasis is given to contraceptive methods and services thus giving a clear impression that sexual behavior or activity even among minors is acceptable for as long as the risk of teenage pregnancy or early marriage are addressed.

The mandatory classroom based sex education provisions in the bill comes to mind once more because last Tuesday, I was privileged to listen to the lecture of Dr. Judith A. Reisman, Ph.D., one of the most sought after speakers and consultants of parliaments, legislatures and courts worldwide regarding a) fraudulent sex science, sex education and b) the power and effect of images and media monopoly to alter human brain, mind, memory and conduct.

Apparently, and as usual we have again copied and patterned the proposed sex education program in classrooms after the sex education programs for young Americans which Dr. Reisman was discussing. Dr. Reisman clearly and convincingly traced the origin of this human sexuality education to Alfred Kinsey, the man who instigated the sexual revolution in the US way back in 1948 with his dubious scientific research on human sexual behavior that has since been referred to as the "Kinsey Reports".

These reports had such a tremendous impact on the morals of American society such that the era before 1948 has been known as the "pre-Kinsey Reports" while the era thereafter and up to now, is called the "post Kinsey Reports". As Dr. Reisman explained, after these reports came out, the field of American education had acquired a new dimension in the form of sexual education based on the sexual research of Alfred Kinsey who claimed that sexual activity began much earlier in life (from birth), so there is nothing wrong in teaching young people that sex can be fun.

In her book, "Sexual Sabotage", Dr. Reisman demolished the foundations of these two reports by showing that in his sexual research Kinsey merely "questioned an unrepresentative proportion of prison inmates and sexual offenders in a survey of 'normal' sexual behavior". She also pointed out that at least some of these offenders who are "the sources of information on stimulation to orgasm in young children" are pedophiles. "Sexual Sabotage" also tells the story of how Kinsey and his cohorts in Indiana University "sabotage our nation during World War II and the decades that followed by entering our libraries and schools as sex educators -- ridiculing marriage, fidelity and chastity. They preached widespread sexual experimentation, succeeded in nationwide fraud campaigns, and gutted the tough laws that kept pornography and predators at bay."

Dr. Reisman likewise relates in her book "how and why the children of the Greatest Generation traded their parents' traditional morality for Kinsey's sexual immorality believing that sexual freedom was their own idea" and "how billions made by the "Sex Industrial Complex' propelled pornography and the spread of Sexually Transmissible Diseases (STDs). And she backed this up with shocking statistics on the substantial increase in the number of teenage pregnancies, child sexual abuse, abortion and STDs in the United States. Then she mentioned that these "deviant fraud campaigns are vetted by the Rockefeller Foundation, the International Planned Parenthood Foundation (IPPF) which is the foremost advocate of abortion and later the Playboy Magazine.

Our legislators should therefore consider all these findings that have devastating effects on the social and moral fabric of a nation like the US which has sex education programs for young Americans that we are now substantially adopting in the proposed in the RH bill. And if only for this reason, they should scrap the bill right away. Instead they should think of how we can return to and restore the traditional sexual morality of Filipinos in the '50s and earlier which have somehow been also eroded by this fraudulent Kinsey Reports.

* * *

And speaking of the '50s, those years were indeed the golden era worth recalling and reminiscing. During those times, teenagers had not yet been affected by the modern concepts about human sexuality that was introduced by Kinsey in America. They look up to sex as something sacred and had high moral values inculcated by their parents. Of course there were also campus romances but they still observe and generally follow the Filipino custom of "no touch". It is thus timely to go back and try to remember those golden years.

And one of the ways of doing so is of course by attending school homecomings usually held annually. The UST High School is precisely holding such grand alumni homecoming tomorrow, Feb. 4, 2012 starting at 5 p.m. at the UST Plaza Mayor and Benavidez Garden coming just one week after the close of the University's 400th anniversary celebration. The grand alumni homecoming promises to be a colorful night of nostalgia, camaraderie, networking reminiscing and all around fun among alumni from 1940s all the way to 2011.

Also check out the information & resource pack (PDF) by the Women's Support Project, written for both parents and professionals, a 68-page document full of information and links.

By Judith A. Reisman, PhD
Institute of Education, London, December 1-2, 2011
View PDF version
View on Scribd

By Bob Unruh
WorldNetDaily, January 14, 2012

Alfred Kinsey's belief in child sexuality, with all of its impacts on children and society, now circles the globe, but a campaign to reveal the truth about his efforts to legitimize pedophilia is following right behind.

Judith Reisman, a visiting professor of law at Liberty University, popular lecturer and former consultant to four U.S. Department of Justice administrations, recently concluded a trip in which she delivered seminars on the fallacies of Kinsey's arguments in Rome, Ireland and London.

One of her books exposing the agenda of Kinsey's lifelong campaign recently has been translated into Chinese.

"The Kinsey Institute is very active in the sexology field, holding conferences in every major nation in the world. They've been training the sexologists, sex educators in every country," Reisman told WND.

"There's not a single country that educates the public about sex where the institutional position, [the teachers], have not been trained in the Kinsey model," she said.

Her books, including "Kinsey: Crimes and Consequences" and "Sexual Sabotage," show that Kinsey's research was based on "illegal sexual experimentation on several hundred young children."

His research results came not from a scientific cross-section of American, but from "hundreds of sex offenders, prostitutes, prison inmates and exhibitionists," she documents. Kinsey, Reisman explained, used these people to represent the sexual activities and behaviors of the "Greatest Generation."

The"K Bomb," as she calls it -- the "studies," claims and "research" launched from the institute's headquarters behind the gothic limestone Indiana University façade -- have been used to "subvert" the nation's traditional morality.

The impact has been seen worldwide.

"People in other countries are contacting me, asking me to please come and deliver the truth," she told WND.

Kinsey's extreme view of sexuality is typified by a statement posted on the website of the North American Man-Boy Love Association, which advocates sex between adults and children.

The statement, from Kinsey's book "Sexual Behavior in the Human Female," defends adult-child sex and accuses those who object to it of being responsible for "serious effects" suffered by children.

"When children are constantly warned by parents and teachers against contacts with adults, and when they receive no explanation of the exact nature of the contacts, they are ready to become hysterical as soon as any older person approaches, or stops and speaks to them in the street, or fondles them, or proposes to do something for them, even though the adult may have had no sexual objective in mind. Some of the more experienced students of juvenile problems have come to believe that the emotional reactions of the parents, police officers, and other adults who discover that the child has had such a contact, may disturb the child more seriously than the sexual contacts themselves. The current hysteria over sex offenders may very well have serious effects on the ability of many of these children to work out sexual adjustments some years later."

Judith Reisman (Photo credit: Sherrie Buzby)

The acceptance of Kinsey's research of rapists, pedophiles and others has helped foster widespread sexual experimentation and an anything-goes atmosphere.

It has resulted in a "gutting" of the nation's tough laws that previously had kept pornography and predators at bay, she explains.

Reisman says that although Kinsey's beliefs are taught at every level of education - from elementary school to college - and quoted in textbooks as undisputed truth, his research was "grotesquely fraudulent."

Among her charges is that Kinsey's data came from sources who would stimulate young children, as young as two months, "orally and manually for up to 24 hours at a time."

Reisman has lectured at Princeton, Notre Dame, Georgetown, Pepperdine, Johns Hopkins, the FBI, the U.S. Air Force Academy, the University of Jerusalem, University of Haifa and Tel Aviv University. She has been cited by the London Times, Time, Newsweek, the New York Times and the Washington Post. She has appeared on "Entertainment Tonight," "Larry King Live," "Donahue," the"Today" show and "Crossfire."

She's been listed in "The World's Who's Who of Women."

On her recent trip to Rome, she presented her research to the Alliance of the Holy Family International, including Cardinal Raymond Burke, Cardinal Ricardo Vidal and other leaders of the organization.

A Vatican organizer of the events called Reisman's work critical to the ministry of the Catholic Church.

Reisman also delivered presentations in Ireland, where she trained nurses and doctors about the true methodology of Kinsey.

"The most fascinating information [developed], for me, during the discussions, when it slowly emerged that abortion, allegedly illegal, was being carried out, apparently selectively, among the Philippine population. The number of allegedly 'dead' babies identified by ... doctors actually shocked these nurses," she reported.

"When I left, the Philippine attendees were planning to begin investigating whether indeed they were being targeted for selective abortions and, if so, when this process began."

In London, her focus was on creating safe schools, and she reported how sex "education" often is used for sex "indoctrination."

"Following the meeting, Jonathan Evans, MP for Cardiff North, and Andrea Leadsom, MP for South Northamptonshire, joined parents in delivering to the department of education a 47,000-signature petition ... calling for sex DVDs to be banned from U.K. primary schools."

Reisman further told WND that following the translation of Kinsey's work into Chinese, some 500,000 copies of his advocacy for pedophilia have been sold.

As a result, two credentialed Chinese professors translated her book "Kinsey: Crimes and Consequences' into Chinese, she said.

Meanwhile, her work in the U.S. continues. Last year she was at a symposium for "minor-attracted people" that was sponsored by the group B4U-ACT, which disseminated "accurate information" to argue that pedophilia is just another sexual orientation.

"If a foreign country came in and did this to our nation, the nation would be outraged," Reisman told WND about the B4U-Act event, also attended by J. Matt Barber, vice president of Liberty Counsel Action.

The speakers urged the removal of pedophilia from the American Psychiatric Association's list of mental defects in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Reisman explained the same strategy was used by homosexual activists in the 1970s when same-sex attractions were removed from the APA's list of disorders. Eventually, the legalization of "gay marriage," the mandatory homosexuality lessons in public schools and the brand new policy of allowing open homosexuality in the U.S. military resulted.

The recent event wasn't a meeting of minor unknowns.

"Dr. John Sadler (University of Texas) argued that diagnostic criteria for mental disorders should not be based on concepts of vice since such concepts are subject to shifting social attitudes and doing so diverts mental-health professions from their role as healers," the B4U-ACT organization said in a report about its symposium in Baltimore.

Another celebrity was Fred Berlin of Johns Hopkins who argued in favor of "acceptance of and compassion for people who are attracted to minors," the report continued.

The report pointedly referred to "minor-attracted people" in reference to pedophiles and explained that the concerns can be resolved with "accurate information." Richard Kramer, who represented B4U-ACT at the event, contended listing pedophilia as a disorder stigmatizes the "victims" of the lifestyle choice.

According to Barber, conference speakers said the APA's Diagnostic Manual should "focus on the needs" of the pedophile and should have "a minimal focus on social control" rather than on the "need to protect children."

Barber, an ardent advocate for Judeo-Christian values and the traditional family, told WND the symposium was "the North American Man-Boy Love Association all dolled up and dressed in the credible language of the elitist Ph.Ds."

"This is a bunch of morally relative, highly educated people in the mental health community who are trying to achieve the ultimate in tolerance," Barber said. "These are the people who are the disciples of Alfred Kinsey."

Further, a campaign last year was launched in the U.K. to allow convicted pedophiles to adopt children, since depriving them of that privilege could "breach their human rights."

"There is no reason why all sex offenders should not be considered as potentially suitable to adopt or foster children, or work with them," said an advocate.

Reisman also cited the decision last week by Greece to expand a list of disability categories approved by the government to include pedophiles and exhibitionists.

The Greek government said the list also includes pyromaniacs, compulsive gamblers, fetishists and sadomasochists.

WND Managing Editor David Kupelian, shortly after publication of "The Marketing of Evil" in 2005, predicted publicly that the next "liberation movement" to assault America would be "the mainstreaming of adult-child sex."

Now he has noted, "The same godless logic that leads to normalization of homosexual marriage will lead also to the de-stigmatization and decriminalization of pedophilia. Remember, consensuality has replaced morality in today's legal system, so a young person 'consent' to have sex will ultimately trump the old-fashioned desire to protect the innocent. Also, since adult-child sex is a 'cultural preference' in certain non-Western countries, child-molestation lobbyists are now making the argument that criminalizing adult-child sex amounts to condemning another culture. So that's where multiculturalism has brought us."

WorldNetDaily, December 31, 2011

WASHINGTON - Abiding Truth Ministries, a pro-family activist group, today named WND founder Joseph Farah among the nation's top-10 "pro-family champions."

"I rate these groups and individuals based upon my own subjective 'Courage Index,'" explained Scott Lively, director of the group. "In my estimation, the following groups/individuals have the most of it and have risked the most in defense of biblical truth on the issue of homosexuality."

Besides Lively's own group, the list includes:

• Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth.
• Brian Camenker of MassResistance.
• Joseph Farah of WND.
• Linda Harvey of Mission: America.
• Bryan Fisher of American Family Association.
• Mat Staver, Matt Barber and Judith Reisman of Liberty Counsel.
• Dr. Joseph Nicolosi of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality.
• Regina Griggs of Parents and Friends of Gays and Ex-Gays.
• Bishop E.W. Jackson of Exodus Faith Ministries.

Lively is the author of the controversial book, "The Pink Swastika," about the homosexual influence within the Nazi hierarchy. Abiding Truth Ministries' mission is to promote and defend the biblical view of marriage and family through education, training and funding.

"I am very grateful to be honored by Abiding Truth Ministries and to be included among such distinguished and courageous luminaries," said Farah.

Farah is the only former top newspaper executive in America to form an independent, national online news outlet back in 1997 - the very first of its kind. He is the author or co-author of 13 books that have sold more than 5 million copies. Prior to launching WND.com, he was editor-in-chief of the Sacramento Union, then the oldest daily west of the Mississippi and the original newspaper home of Mark Twain, Bret Harte and Herb Cain. Previously he served as editor-in-chief of the daily Glendale News-Press and a group of Southern California weeklies in Burbank and the surrounding communities. He was also executive news editor of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. In 1991, he founded the Western Journalism Center, a non-profit organization sponsoring investigative reporting and journalism education. Farah took over Oliver North's long-running daily national radio talk show, serving as host for three years. He serves as chief executive officer and editor of WND.

Farah's many journalism awards include honors for reporting to writing headlines to honesty and courage in journalism to editing and newspaper design.

Last year Farah challenged the Conservative Political Action Conference's decision to allow GOProud, a Republican-leaning homosexual activist group, to sponsor the largest annual gathering of conservatives in Washington. Earlier this year, GOProud was dropped from future sponsorship. He was also attacked by Ann Coulter as a "phony Christian" and a "publicity whore" for disinviting her to his "Taking America Back" conference last fall because of her support for GOProud, for which she serves on the advisory board.

[Also see the 1996 article by the same author: Pedophilia Chic]

By Mary Eberstadt
The Weekly Standard, January 1, 2001, Vol. 6, No. 16

UNTIL VERY, VERY RECENTLY, public questioning of the social prohibition against pedophilia--to say nothing of positive celebration of child molestation--was practically non-existent in American life. The reasons why are not opaque. To most people, the very word "pedophilia" summons forth a preternatural degree of horror and revulsion; and the criminal law that reflects those reactions has consistently treated the sexual molestation of minors as a serious and eminently punishable offense. So it is small wonder that, historically speaking, the taboo against using legal minors for sex was no more publicly controversial in the United States than the prohibitions against, say, cannibalism or bestiality. Those few partisans of the idea who did sometimes sally forth customarily found themselves regarded as the lowest of the social low, even by the criminal class.

This social consensus against the sexual exploitation of children and adolescents, however--unlike those against, say, animal sex or incest--is apparently eroding, and this regardless of the fact that the vast majority of citizens do overwhelmingly abominate the thing. For elsewhere in the public square, the defense of adult-child sex--more accurately, man-boy sex--is now out in the open. Moreover, it is on parade in a number of places--therapeutic, literary, and academic circles; mainstream publishing houses and journals and magazines and bookstores--where the mere appearance of such ideas would until recently have been not only unthinkable, but in many cases, subject to prosecution.

Dramatic though this turnaround may be, it did not happen overnight. Four years ago in these pages, in an essay called "Pedophilia Chic," I described in some detail a number of then-recent public challenges to this particular taboo, all of them apparently isolated from one another.¹ Plainly, as the record even then showed, a surprising number of voices were willing to rise up on behalf of what advocates refer to as "man-boy love," or what most people call sexual abuse.

Yet while the examples themselves were easy enough to document, their larger meaning seemed far from clear. Why, in a post-Cold War world bursting with real political controversies, were some people intent on insisting that the time had come to rethink an issue that most people already vehemently, passionately, agreed about? And why was the taboo against pedophilia under particular pressure in the mid-1990s, of all times--an interval when, readers will recall, public attention to the sexual abuse of girl children had simultaneously reached an all-time high? Perhaps, or so it seemed reasonable to speculate, all that really lay behind these efforts was just that familiar postmodern idol, shock value. Perhaps this "pedophilia chic," I guessed then, was simply "the last gasp of a nihilism that has exhausted itself by chasing down every other avenue of liberation, only to find one last roadblock still manned by the bourgeoisie."

Four-plus years and many other challenges to the same taboo later, it is clear that this hypothesis got something wrong. For one thing, no sustained public challenges have arisen over other primal taboos. Even more telling, if nihilism and nihilism alone were the explanation for public attempts to legitimize sex with boy children, then we would expect the appearance of related attempts to legitimize sex with girl children; and these we manifestly do not see.² Nobody, but nobody, has been allowed to make the case for girl pedophilia with the backing of any reputable institution. Publishing houses are not putting out acclaimed anthologies and works of fiction that include excerpts of men having sex with young girls. Psychologists and psychiatrists are not competing with each other to publish studies demonstrating that the sexual abuse of girls is inconsequential; or, indeed, that it ought not even be defined as "abuse."

Two examples from the last few weeks will suffice to show the double standard here. In the November 12 New York Times Book Review, a writer found it unremarkable to observe of his subject, biographer Gavin Lambert, that when "Lambert was a schoolboy of 11, a teacher initiated him [into homosexuality], and he 'felt no shame or fear, only gratitude.'" It is unimaginable that New York Times editors would allow a reviewer to describe an 11-year-old girl being sexually "initiated" by any adult (in that case, "initiation" would be called "sexual abuse"). Similarly, in mid-December the New York Times Magazine delivered a cover piece about gay teenagers in cyberspace which was so blase about the older men who seek out boys in chat rooms that it dismissed those potential predators as mere "oldies." Again, one can only imagine the public outcry had the same magazine published a story taking the same so-what approach to online solicitation, off-line trysts, and pornography "sharing" between anonymous men and underage girls.

No: As was true four years ago, contemporary efforts to rationalize, legitimize, and justify pedophilia are about boys. Forget about abstractions like nihilism; what the record shows is something more prosaic. The reason why the public is being urged to reconsider boy pedophilia is that this "question," settled though it may be in the opinions and laws of the rest of the country, is demonstrably not yet settled within certain parts of the gay rights movement. The more that movement has entered the mainstream, the more this "question" has bubbled forth from that previously distant realm into the public square. It should go without saying, though under the circumstances it cannot, that many, many leaders and members of that movement draw a firm line at consenting adults, want no part of any such "debate," and are in fact disgusted and appalled by it. Then there are other opinions.

I

Let us begin with one recent public challenge to the taboo against pedophilia that did garner the public attention it deserved, albeit belatedly, and which demonstrates both the boy-specific character of today's revisionism and the gulf between popular and other views of the subject. This was the episode that began with the publication in July 1998 of an essay in the American Psychological Association's (APA) prestigious Psychological Bulletin called "A Meta-Analytic Examination of Assumed Properties of Child Sexual Abuse Using College Samples" and co-authored by Bruce Rind (Temple University), Robert Bauserman (University of Michigan), and Philip Tromovitch (University of Pennsylvania).

The density of its professional jargon and 30-plus pages aside, the argument of "Meta-Analytic" was straightforward enough: that the common belief that "child sexual abuse causes intense harm, regardless of gender" was not supported by the studies the authors cited; that, to the contrary, "negative effects [of child sexual abuse] were neither pervasive nor typically intense, and that men reacted much less negatively than women." The article also criticized the "indiscriminate use of this term [child sexual abuse] and related terms such as victim and perpetrator," suggesting instead that the child's feelings about sex acts with adults should be taken into account, and that "a willing encounter with positive reactions would be labeled simply adult-child sex."

What was equally radical about "Meta-Analytic," though less discussed at the time, was its specific comparison of pedophilia to "behaviors such as masturbation, homosexuality, fellatio, cunnilingus, and sexual promiscuity." All such, the authors noted, "were codified as pathological in the first edition of the American Psychiatric Association's (1952) 'Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders'"; and all are so codified no more. What this analogy tacitly suggested, of course, was the assurance that pedophilia, too, would someday take its place at the liberationist table. In the meantime, as the authors put it, "This history of conflating morality and law with science in the area of human sexuality by psychologists and others indicates a strong need for caution in scientific inquiries of sexual behaviors that remain taboo, with child sexual abuse being a prime example [emphasis added]."

As MIT psychologist G. E. Zuriff observed later in an essay for the Public Interest, "It is not difficult to see how these ideas would antagonize not only Dr. Laura [Schlessinger] but the public at large." For although the incendiary potential of asking people to give pedophilia a second look may or may not have been grasped by the APA authorities who accepted the article for publication, no such ambiguity marked the reaction of the lay public. Most people were made aware of "Meta-Analytic" in March 1999, when Schlessinger devoted the first of two radio talks to attacking the article, and their own livid view of the matter was made known in the course of a multi-dimensional public uproar that took months to die down. The denouement was a series of unusual events, including a public castigation of the American Psychological Association by majority whip Tom DeLay; a House vote to condemn the "Meta-Analytic" essay itself (355-0, with 13 abstentions); and a highly unusual public rejection by the APA of the piece's conclusions, along with a promise to acquire an independent evaluation of the article.

In retrospect, there were two significant and little-noticed facts in all this. One was not so much the schism that this controversy revealed between elite-therapeutic and popular thinking about pedophilia, but rather that the schism itself had gone unnoticed for so long. For shocking though it may have been to the general public, "Meta-Analytic" was in fact only the latest in a very long series of professional attempts to revise therapeutic conceptions of boy pedophilia, attempts of which most lay readers remain quite ignorant.

Professionals in the field know better. Fifteen years ago, for example, in his careful research volume "Child Sexual Abuse," noted authority David Finkelhor was already drawing attention to the "body of opinion and research [that] has emerged in recent years which is trying hard to vindicate homosexual pedophilia." To read Finkelhor's sources on the subject--or, for that matter, to read the notes in the heavily sourced "Meta-Analytic" itself--is to see exactly what he means. In their call to redefine "abuse" as "contact," for example, Rind, Bauserman, and Tromovitch were merely resurrecting research and conceptual work stretching back over two decades; similarly, their distinctions between boys' and girls' supposed experiences of abuse have a pedigree that begins with Kinsey and branches out dramatically in professional publications of the last 25 years. The authors of "Meta-Analytic" may have made their points boldly enough to get noticed; but that is the only academic novelty to which they could truly lay claim. The real news about the normalization of pedophilia displayed in "Meta-Analytic" was that nothing about it was conceptually new.

The second peculiarity of the outrage over "Meta-Analytic," which also went unnoticed at the time, was that it was not, in fact, universally shared. The notorious North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), predictably enough, cheered the study as "good news." Less explicable was the reaction within the gay press, which not only failed to distance its movement from the study, but went on to excoriate the APA's critics (particularly Laura Schlessinger). This was the same approach taken, independently, by at least two mainstream--and relatively conservative--gay journalists.

Writing in the New York Times Magazine, prominent author and activist Andrew Sullivan complained about the "sour reception" that had greeted the study. After all, he wrote, Rind et al. had found that "lasting psychological trauma among adult survivors of abuse, particularly for men, was much less than feared." This, according to Sullivan, should be "a reason for relief." Instead, and what he evidently found disagreeable, "outraged members of the religious right accused the APA of tolerating pedophilia" and "launched a crusade to punish the organization." He concluded sarcastically: "That'll teach them to look on the bright side."

Another writer outraged over the outrage about "Meta-Analytic" was respected reporter and political analyst Jonathan Rauch. In his commentary on the controversy published in the National Journal, Rauch roundly defended the study. It was the critics of the "Meta-Analytic" piece, Rauch wrote, who were "turning out stomach-churning stuff." The vote in Congress--as opposed, say, to what Rind et al. had written--was "faintly sinister." Like the authors of the piece itself, Rauch advocated that, in the name of "science," researchers should "abandon the current custom of referring to all adult sexual encounters with minors, regardless of the circumstances, as 'child sexual abuse,'" because they could "perform finer-grained analyses if they used 'abuse' to denigrate injurious or unwilling encounters. Other encounters," Rauch echoed, "could be called 'adult-child sex' or 'adult-adolescent sex.'"

To his credit, Rauch did report that "in 1989, when he was 23 and just out of college, Bauserman [one of the Meta-Analytic authors] published a cross-cultural comparison of attitudes toward man-boy sexual relations in a Dutch journal called Paidika." This journal, in Rauch's description, "had taken pro-pedophilia stands"--something which he admitted "raises red flags."

But at the same time Rauch, like Sullivan, avoided the real issue at hand--that "Meta-Analytic" quite obviously aimed at de-stigmatizing boy pedophilia itself. Even more startling, though, was his bland depiction of Paidika. This is not exactly a journal in which pro-pedophile ideas have somehow surfaced accidentally. It is a publication dedicated to the phenomenon of "boy-loving," the most prominent such "scholarly journal" in the world, whose longtime editor, the late Edward Brongersma, was a convicted pedophile as well as the author of a two-volume pedophile classic, "Loving Boys." (To describe this as a journal which "had taken pro-pedophilia stands" is akin to describing The Weekly Standard as a magazine where conservative arguments have reportedly appeared.) And, of course, the qualifier "23 and just out of college" served to soften Bauserman's earlier appearance in Paidika, suggesting it was an excess of youth.

Both Sullivan and Rauch are not only prominent gay journalists but also leading proponents of the worldview to which the gay rights movement owes much of its recent and stunning political success--the argument that, as Sullivan's "Virtually Normal" puts it, "homosexuals . . . have the equivalent emotional needs and temptations of heterosexuals." Both writers are also members of the Independent Gay Forum, an institution aimed at "forging a mainstream identity"; and both have frequently broken ranks with the leftists and radicals who dominate gay activism. That two such mainstream authors should mock the public outcry against that APA article illustrates something noteworthy: that in place of a social consensus against pedophilia per se, a separate option--call it anti-anti-pedophilia--appears to have taken root. According to that view, the problem is less sex with minors than the people who declare themselves against it--Dr. Laura fans, congressmen, dissident therapists, religious types, and anyone else who does not grasp the necessity of putting words like "child sexual abuse" in quotes.

II

In some of the clinical and therapeutic literature on pedophilia, it has become customary to distinguish between "ephebophilia," or sexual attraction to prepubescent children and teenagers, and "pedophilia" proper, meaning attraction to prepubescent children. Both forms are exhibited more than occasionally in another part of the written world, namely gay fiction. "Fiction" here emphatically does not mean pornography as such, but the kind of literature authored by self-consciously gay writers, published by reputable houses, and reviewed respectfully in the mainstream press. Again, it must be emphasized that numerous gay authors of note do not positively portray sex between adults and minors, and ipso facto are not part of this discussion.

Plenty of authors do cross the line, though. "Gay fiction," Philip Guichard complained in an article for the Village Voice last summer, "is rich with idyllic accounts of 'intergenerational relationships,' as such affairs are respectfully called these days." Over four years ago, "Pedophilia Chic" quoted passages from the works of several acclaimed authors--including Edmund White, the late Paul Monette, and Larry Kramer--which frankly and often sympathetically portrayed men seeking and having sex with underage boys. Today there are many more such examples to be found in gay fiction, all verifiable by a trip to the local chain bookstore.

Last year, for example, St. Martins Press published a novel called "The Coming Storm" by Paul Russell, a professor of English at Vassar and the author of three previously well-received works of fiction. The drama of this tale revolves around something that remains an imprisonable offense in almost every state--a sexual "affair" between a troubled 15-year-old boy (Noah) and his 25-year-old gay boarding school teacher (Tracy). (The age of 15, incidentally, is no definitive limit in Russell's narrative. In the course of the book, Tracy also fantasizes about 14-year-old boys.)

"The Coming Storm" became the object of effusive praise by award-winning reviewer Dennis Drabelle in the Washington Post Book World (August 15, 1999). "The Coming Storm," Drabelle enthused, "takes off from a sensational subject--forbidden sexuality--to arrive at unexpected heights and subtleties." It "persuades the reader" that "the sexual relationship between Noah and Tracy is not only not harmful to either but a boon to the precocious junior partner, who becomes a better, more engaged student after the affair gets under way." What is "troublesome" about the book, according to Drabelle, is not that anyone is "corrupted" by what happens ("no one is"), but that "it is apt to be stereotyped, not least by the legal system that makes it a crime [emphasis added]."

This cheerleading for the sexual molestation of teenagers in the Sunday pages of one of the country's major newspapers did not pass without comment. One reader berated Drabelle in the letters column for "strongly implying that child abuse, when it takes place between two males, should no longer be viewed by the public as either a social offense or a crime."³ Yet as even a partial survey of related literature shows, what is truly anomalous about this case--of a mainstream reviewer in a mainstream family newspaper ratifying sex between grown men and boys--was that anyone bothered to be bothered about it at all. Other writers, including prominent writers among them, have gone further still, and with even less consequence.

Consider David Leavitt, one of the best known of contemporary gay authors, whose numerous novels and short stories, among them "The Lost Language of Cranes" and, most recently, "Martin Bauman; or, A Sure Thing," are routinely reviewed in the better journals and magazines. In fact, it would be hard to think of a gay fiction writer more consistently represented in mainstream publishing.

For that reason, it is all the more surprising to read what this ostensibly mainstream author chose to write in his introduction to the equally mainstream "Penguin Book of International Gay Writing" (1995, edited by Mark Mitchell). There, in the course of describing what the anthology includes, Leavitt notes matter-of-factly that "Another 'forbidden' topic from which European writers seem less likely to shrink is the love of older men for young boys." He then draws attention to one particular book excerpted in the volume, "When Jonathan Died," by Tony Duvert. "The coolly assured narrative" of this work, Leavitt informs, "compels the reader to imagine the world from a perspective he might ordinarily condemn." Duvert, writes Leavitt, "offers us a homosexual Lolita--one in which the child is seducer as much as seduced."

The object of this praise by one of America's leading gay novelists, appearing in one of publishing's most prestigious book series, is the tale of a man and boy who are living together in Italy. The scene selected is sexually graphic. And the age of this child, whom Leavitt considers "seducer as much as seduced"? He is--page 427 in the hard cover edition--"hardly seven."

Another seemingly representative collection of gay literature, this one on the shelf at Barnes & Noble and also apparently selling without comment, is "The Gay Canon: Great Books Every Gay Man Should Read," an Anchor Book published by Doubleday in 1998. Its editor/author, Robert Drake, is a novelist and editor of other anthologies who has won the Lambda Literary Award. Like the Penguin anthology edited by Leavitt, Drake's book too strives for canonical status, aspiring to offer a roadmap to the most important texts of gay history.

As it turns out, several of the texts that editor Drake thought worth including feature scenes of man-boy sex--again, what most of the rest of the public calls abuse or molestation. One work is something called "The Carnivorous Lamb" by Agustin Gomez-Arcos, described as a book about an incestuous relationship between a boy and his older brother (to Drake, "the best, most complex yet satisfying novel of filial love ever written"). Another text, this one by writer Matthew Stadler--described as the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship for his first novel--is called "The Dissolution of Nicholas Dee." This book, says editor Drake, "is an operatic adventure into the realms of love, personality, ambition and art . . . a pure joy to read." Its protagonist is "a pedophile's dream: the mind of a man in the body of a boy." Drake also excerpts and discusses William S. Burroughs's nightmarish "The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead," the pederastic violence of which defies description. Yet this work, according to Drake, "tears straight to the heart of one of the greatest sources, community-wide, of 1990s gay angst: What to do with men who love boys?"⁴

Still another example of how standards are being lowered by a major publisher and respected writer--this one from academia and available at Borders--is "A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition," published in 1998 by Yale University Press. This book, "the first full-scale account of gay male literature, across cultures, languages and from ancient times to the present," is authored by Gregory Woods, described on the jacket as "the foremost gay poet working in Britain today." It includes a longish chapter on "Boys and Boyhood" which is a seemingly definitive account of pro-pedophile literary works, ranging over texts from the platonic "Death in Venice" to the noir likes of the aforementioned Tony Duvert. Nothing is questioned, much less condemned, in the course of Woods's account of these works. The only moral ambiguity that occurs to him concerns not the boy but the man in the equation. Woods concludes: "By playing [i.e., having sex] with boys, the man remains boyish. Whether you regard this as a way of retreating from life or, on the contrary, as a way of engaging with it at its most honest and least corrupted level, depends on which writer you consult at any given time [emphasis added]."

III

As for the related matter of gay non-fiction, here too, judging by the public domain, the subject of boy pedophilia has a manifest niche.

One book only recently available in the "gay studies" section of a Borders in downtown D.C., for example, is a peculiar classic of a sort entitled "Male Inter-Generational Intimacy: Historical, Socio-Psychological, and Legal Perspectives," edited by the aforementioned pedophile icon Edward Brongersma and two colleagues. This book, according to one of its jacket endorsements, "[sheds] critical light on the broad spectrum of man-boy love and its place in ancient and contemporary societies." In other words, it is a series of briefs using scientistic polemics in an effort to rationalize the sexual molestation of boy children. The article abstracts speak for themselves. ("Pedophilia is always considered by mainstream society as one form of sexual abuse of children. However, analysis of the personal accounts provided by pedophiles suggests that these experiences could be understood differently." "The incidence of violence is very low in pedophile contacts with boys. The influence can be strong in lasting relationships; it can either be wholesome or unwholesome." And so on.)

Of course, this opus that "gay studies" bookshelves now reserve space for did not spring from nowhere. The book itself grew out of two issues of the American Journal of Homosexuality (Vol. 20, Nos. 1/2, 1990) dedicated to the pondering of "male inter-generational love." Here again, an ostensibly mainstream gay vehicle was put to the service of advocating pedophilia. In fact, the case of the Journal of Homosexuality is particularly interesting as a case study of how a pernicious idea can spread. The editor of this reputable gay journal, John P. DeCecco, is a psychologist at San Francisco State University. DeCecco is favorably quoted in the introduction to "Male Inter-Generational Intimac"y for having praised the "enormously nurturant relationship" that can result from pedophile-boy contact. DeCecco is also on the editorial board of Paidika.

As one would expect, such cross-pollination in gay fiction and criticism is verifiable many times over via the inhuman efficiencies of cyber-correlation. It was not immediately obvious, for example--in fact, it came as a surprise--that typing "Paidika" into an ordinary search engine would turn up a reference to Gay Men's Press bestsellers; but it did not take long to see why. For one of the books on the Gay Men's Press bestseller list turns out to be "Dares to Speak: History and Contemporary Perspectives on Boy-Love," edited by Joseph Geraci--all of whose chapters but one appeared originally in Paidika itself. Another book on the same bestseller list is "Some Boys," described as a "memoir of a lover of boys" that "evokes the author's young friends across four decades and as many continents." Another on the same list is "For a Lost Soldier" by Rudi van Dantzig, advertised as involving sex between an 11-year-old boy and a Canadian soldier in Holland in 1944. There are more.

Surfing also makes plain that the better-known gay organizations, all of whom stand dead set against any conflation of homosexuality and pedophilia, are nonetheless sending mixed messages about what is and is not off-limits for the underage. Most of them, for instance, now have "youth sections" on their websites for and about legal minors. The justification for this heightened attention to the young is to ameliorate the angst of gay teenagers. At the risk of stating the obvious, though, it is hard to see how this purpose is served by encouraging boys to act and think sexually at ever younger ages, which is an all but unavoidable side effect of the type of "outreach" these sites engage in.

Consider, for example, the website of PFLAG (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), one of the more respected gay rights organizations in the country. It is just a click of the mouse from PFLAG's "useful links" to a site where one can read the "coming-out" stories of children aged 10, 11, and 12. Similarly, the "youth" section of GLAAD's publication list (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) simply assumes that minors are sexually autonomous--and active. One piece ("Landmark Survey Shows Gay Youth Coming Out Earlier than Ever") notes approvingly that most children now "realize" their orientation at age 12. Another piece, "Lesbian and Gay Youth Find Safe Place in Cyberspace," counsels: "Don't believe much of the hype about how cyberspace is populated with pedophiles." These citations are taken from just the first two pages of GLAAD's 15-page list of publications for and about "gay youth."

At OutProud--another site recommended and linked by leading gay organizations--visitors are routed to a comic strip called "Queer Boys." It features two boys who are said to be 16 and look younger. They set off for Manhattan ("Let's run away to New York, where it's safe to be Queer!!" "Kewl!"), where they triumph over evildoers (i.e., parents and reparative therapists) and find happiness at last thanks to the habitues of a bar in the West Village. ("A gay rock club! That's so cool! Damn! I wish we were old enough to get in!!" says one of the boys. "Damn those politicians! Damn them all to hell!!" replies the other.)

For a final example of how pedophilia is being defined down, consider XY magazine--which would doubtless have run afoul of the obscenity laws until very recently. Started just four years ago, XY is now, according to its founder and publisher Peter Ian Cummings, the "third largest gay magazine in the U.S., selling over 60,000 copies per year and [having] more than 200,000 readers." (These numbers are unaudited, but would put XY on a par with the Advocate in circulation, though lower than Out magazine's 120,000.) Cummings also reports that "you can find XY on sale in Borders, Tower Records, Virgin Megastores, B. Dalton, Barnes & Noble, Waldenbooks, and many others."

What gives XY its unprecedented niche is that here, for the first time, is a mass-market magazine "officially targeted toward 12-29 year old young gay men," every issue of which, as one admiring journalist puts it, "features scantily clad young men in several photo spreads and on the cover." Then there is the non-photo content. The first issue was stamped "Underage." Another issue included a sympathetic pro-and-con interview with a prominent member of NAMBLA. An article in another issue was titled "F--the Age of Consent." There is also a smattering of self-help that can only make minors easier to find--for example, advice about what kids should do if their parents install a filtering system that prevents them from reaching gay cyberspace (answer: get around it).

In sum, if one had taken on the challenge of designing a magazine for pedophiles, it would probably look a lot like XY, which is why its market niche and evident reader support invite reflection. So too, for obvious reasons, does the public (gay) reaction to all this. On the one hand, Out magazine referred to XY's debut as a "dubious achievement" and suggested that it was equivalent to child pornography. Similarly, Philip Guichard complained in his Village Voice piece (headlined "I Hate Older Men"): "Mainstream gay culture dresses up its kiddie porn in a pretense of serving teens. As nice as it is to believe that magazines like XY and Joey [a recent competitor] are actually consumed by gay teens, it's obvious to me that the shirtless kids in provocative poses who fill their glossy pages are there for older men." What's more, XY's publisher has complained of "pedophobia" on the part of his gay critics; and most advertisers, by Cummings's account, including those popular with the male gay market (Calvin Klein, Abercrombie & Fitch, the Gap), have demurred from buying space in its pages. Apparently, the fear of supporting child sex, or the fear of appearing to do so--or both--remain potent corporate motivators.⁵

At the same time, however, to judge by the endorsements on XY's website, numerous other observers have weighed in favorably. The San Francisco Examiner says that of all magazines, XY is "the one most on the cutting edge of change." The Ft. Lauderdale Express Gay News calls it "the most courageous magazine in America." The general-interest entertainment guide Time Out New York observes that "XY has boldly established itself as a unique publication that tackles sex, romance, and other issues facing gay teens and men." But perhaps the most accurate indication of XY's community standing comes from the business publication Advertising Age, which noted: "XY is playing a significant role in mainstream online media. . . . The magazine's site can be accessed directly via America Online, and the magazine is also providing content to the 'youth channel' on PlanetOut.com." This success is a sign of the times. Some of the largest and most respected gay organizations in the country now list XY, of all things, as a "resource" for gay youth--this, alongside a burgeoning number of websites also aimed at minors and replete with personal ads, chat rooms, "pen pals," and other forms of anonymous contact rife with the potential for subterfuge.

IV

It is tempting to throw up one's hands on reading a litany like this one, and to blame it all on our anything-goes postmodern life. But this is determinism masquerading as pessimism, and a determinism that does not fit the facts. Today's pressures to normalize pedophilia are not the result of some omnipotent and unstoppable taboo-devouring social and moral juggernaut; they are occurring one bookstore, one magazine, one publisher and advertiser, one author and editor and consumer at a time. Case by case, given a more enlightened public, it is not hard to imagine these decisions--like the one that led to Penguin's putting its imprimatur on a pedophilic sex scene, or like the misguided efforts by some gay organizations to refer teens to unsavory and perhaps even unsafe websites--being made otherwise. Such a turnaround is particularly imaginable in the case of chain bookstore merchandisers, who routinely place pro-pedophile works on the gay-interest shelves--a phenomenon that thoughtful movement activists must find outrageous.

It would help immensely if those members of the gay rights movement who have not realized what is being committed in their name--along with those who do realize what is going on, and who deplore it--join forces against this trend. Here too, one can imagine progress being made; decent people, by definition, tend ultimately to do what decency requires. When "Pedophilia Chic" appeared four years ago, for example, a poignant response soon came from Paul W. Simmons, the political director of the Log Cabin Republicans in Houston. He feared that the piece would leave readers with the "erroneous impression that the gay male community endorses sexual exploitation of adolescent males." The letter continued: "Unfortunately, the homosexual community's political leadership, which is dominated by radical leftists, has failed to denounce loudly the North American Man-Boy Love Association and other nefarious groups. But on this issue, as with many others, the leadership is removed from the constituency it purports to serve. For a sizable majority of gay men, sexual relations with children are viewed as morally appalling, and the adult practitioners of it are seen as pathological deviants."

These are words with which any reasonable person will agree. They also raise the question of why--particularly in light of the astonishing political and social victories of the last several years--leaders of that movement have not been more scrupulous about some of its ranks.

In an interesting pro-movement 1996 book, "Perfect Enemies: The Religious Right, the Gay Movement, and the Politics of the 1990s," authors John Gallagher and Christopher Bull propose an answer of sorts to this question. Most national gay groups, they note, opted for respectability as the movement grew, particularly by passing resolutions denouncing NAMBLA and all it stood for. At the same time, according to the authors, pedophilia advocates did enjoy lingering protection among parts of the movement because "many thoughtful activists who opposed NAMBLA's goals could not escape the suspicion that to denounce the organization would be to mimic society's condemnation of their own sexual orientation."

Whatever its origins, the reluctance by some activists to draw such lines means this: Today, instead of standing foursquare with the rest of the public against this evil, the gay rights movement appears divided. A few proclaim boys to be sexual fair game. Influential others disavow pedophilia per se, but tolerate its advocacy on grounds of political solidarity with persecuted groups. Still others, in the relatively new development noted earlier, appear to have opted for a kind of anti-anti-pedophilia, according to which the "real" problems for the movement are somehow Dr. Laura and the religious right, rather than the facts to which such critics draw attention: e.g., that efforts are being made to destigmatize the sexual exploitation of boy children; or that positive portrayals of "inter-generational sex," which are extremely rare in the rest of the culture, are not rare in gay literature and journalism. And, once again obviously, there are the many, many other people--representative of that "sizable majority" of which the Log Cabin Republican wrote--who must be as distressed by such advocacy as he is, but appear undecided what to do about it.

Today's gay rights advocates preside over what is probably the single most successful domestic political movement of the post-Cold War era. The sine qua non of its dramatic advance has been the tolerance of the civic majority, for whom the movement's most stirring appeals--to equity and fair treatment and "a place at the table," as Bruce Bawer put it--have turned out to resonate more deeply than even most activists could have imagined. This is not to say that public unanimity reigns here, any more than it does over the agendas of other special interest groups. Reasonable people, both inside and outside of the gay rights movement, disagree in good faith on profound points--from the interpretation of Judeo-Christian teachings, to the implications of civil unions, to the appropriate public health measures in the wake of AIDS, to the judicial propriety of hate-crime laws.

But it is not and will not be the case that this same tolerance can be parlayed into support for predators. About pedophilia there remains one and only one proposition that commands public assent. It is this: If the sexual abuse of minors isn't wrong, then nothing is.

Mary Eberstadt's essays and reviews have appeared in The Weekly Standard, Commentary, the Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. She is a former executive editor of the National Interest and more recently a consulting editor to Policy Review.

¹ These included, among other events and soundings, a much-publicized Calvin Klein ad campaign that paid homage to the conventions of child pornography; the publication by a reputable publisher, Prometheus Books, of a book advocating "intergenerational intimacy," i.e. pedophilia; a still-notorious piece in the May 8, 1995, New Republic praising NAMBLA, the North American Man-Boy Love Association, for its "bravery" and suggesting that we lower the age of consent for boys; a sympathetic profile in Vanity Fair of a convicted child pornography trafficker; a sympathetic profile of a pedophile in a celebrated book by author Edmund White; and a review of the writings of several prominent gay authors, all published and acclaimed in mainstream circles, whose books featured sex scenes between men and underage boys. Literary critic Bruce Bawer was a minority voice objecting to the latter trend. See "Pedophilia Chic," The Weekly Standard, June 17, 1996.

² The antinomian and arguably malignant exercise of Nabokov's "Lolita," written 45 years ago, has not only not been surpassed, but remains so controversial today that the latest Hollywood version of the story was not even released in movie theaters in the United States.

³ In response, Drabelle wrote that he "supported the laws that protect children from the sexual advances of predatory adults," that nothing in his review "says or implies otherwise," and that the reader is "entitled to his opinion" about whether "any such affair would inexorably result in wreckage."

⁴ Drake's own answer: "Even as the homo culture of this fin de siecle seeks to puritanically clamp down on boy-love advocates, it riddles itself with a fixation on lithe, boyish sexuality and smooth-chested youthful attractiveness--and the perpetration of same as the physical and erotic ideal apparent in clubs, online profiles, porn films and mainstream advertisements. It is nothing more than blatant hypocrisy."

⁵ According to the publisher, Virgin records, Tower Records, and Smith Kline Beecham have been among XY's few paid advertisers.

[Also see the 2001 article by the same author: "Pedophilia Chic" Reconsidered]

By Mary Eberstadt
The Weekly Standard, June 17, 1996, Vol. 1, No. 39

WHEN MOST AMERICANS hear the word "pedophile," they usually think of men like the self-described "child-molesting demon" Larry Don McQuay, who was released from a prison in East Texas in April and driven to San Antonio to begin a closely supervised, but nonetheless semi-free, new life. And when most Americans think of men like McQuay roaming the streets, they react much as did the outraged, screaming-in-the-streets, placard-carrying citizens of San Antonio. About the mildest thing said by one of them was "I sure hope there will be more indictments" to send McQuay back to jail--this, from the chairman of the state Board of Pardons and Paroles, under whose auspices McQuay was released. The local victims-rights groups were less restrained. As the president of one such group put it, in a straddle between threat and hope, "In this city, he's not going to be safe"--thus summarizing neatly the vigilante desire that most parents, when contemplating a figure like McQuay, would doubtless second.

In addition to a spate of high-profile cases like McQuay's, the past few years have also witnessed an ongoing public obsession with child abuse in any form; a Congress that, at the urging of the White House and Justice Department, has toughened the penalties for child-pornography trafficking; and Bill Clinton's signing of the constitutionally complicated Megan's Law, which makes it impossible for those once convicted of child-sex offenses to move anonymously into an unsuspecting neighborhood. And yet a funny thing happened on the way to today's intense fear and loathing of Chester the Molester. For even as citizens around the country have sought new ways of keeping the McQuays of the world cordoned off from the rest of us, and even as the public rhetoric about protecting America's children has reached deafening levels, a number of enlightened voices have been raised in defense of giving pedophilia itself a second look.

After all--or so some of these voices have suggested--what if pedophilia is in fact a victimless crime? What if teenagers, and even children, are more in control of their emotions, their bodies, their sexuality, than the rest of us think? What if sexual relations with adults are actually "empowering" to the young? What if pedophiles and would-be pedophiles are in fact victims themselves--exploited by the cunning young people they befriend?

There are also the matters of civil liberty. Is it fair to send people to jail for owning, trading, and obsessively consuming child pornography when no one is really injured by such practices? And what about the notion of an "age of consent"--isn't it an anachronism, in this age of adolescent sexual precocity? Shouldn't it be lowered to a more realistic standard? Say, to fourteen? Thirteen? Twelve?

Once upon a time, the reader losing sleep over questions like these would have had to travel to Times Square, or the local porn shop, or perhaps the nearest branch of the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA). But no longer. Now he need only subscribe to the right stylish magazines, the right cutting-edge publishers, and be familiar with the work of the right celebrated authors. It is hard to know what to make of these piecemeal attempts--which amount to nothing so elevated as a movement--to rewrite what most of the rest of us persist in thinking about adults whose sexual interests run to kids. Call it the last gasp of anihilism that has exhausted itself by chasing down every other avenue of liberation, only to find one last roadblock still manned by the bourgeoisie. Call it pedophilia chic.

CALVIN KLEIN'S LEATHER DADDY

For laymen, the best-known example of this phenomenon was last summer's much-reviled and ultimately abandoned ad campaign for Calvin Klein jeans. In fact, as the record will show, when measured against other recent soundings on the subject of adult-child sex, that ad campaign itself appears--pun intended--mere child's play. But first, a review of the facts.

Just about a year ago, the company launched a series of print and television ads that were, according to almost every critic who reviewed them, bizarrely and upsettingly reminiscent of child pornography. Even for a public made blase by exposure to Calvin Klein's many other provocative images, the seediness of this latest effort proved just too much. There were, first, the images themselves: teenage models--most looking bored, with legs spread apart and underwear revealed--lounging around semi-dressed. There was also the matter of setting. The cheap wood paneling and shag carpets were supposed to suggest a suburban rec room--another visual convention, it seems, of the child-porn genre.

By common consent, the scripts for the TV ads--which ran only in New York before being withdrawn--were even more compelling evidence of the campaign's indebtedness to the pornographic canon. In those ads, an offstage male voice seemed to goad the young models into responding through a combination of wiles and special pleading. "You take direction well--do you like to take direction?" the voice asked a girl. The lines to boys were smuttier still. "You got a real nice look. How old are you? Are you strong? You think you could rip that shirt off of you? That's a real nice body. You work out? I can tell." And so on.

Though girls and boys alike appeared in the ads, it was clear to any savvy viewer that the boys, rather than the girls, were the main event. For one thing, there was nothing really new about the girls. As a critic for Adweek remarked at the time, "Girls have been objectified forever. It's not shocking, sad to say." (It is particularly unshocking in a Calvin Klein jeans campaign; after all, it is now fifteen years since an underage Brooke Shields was used to suggestive effect.)

No, what was new in this latest effort was the question of who those boys were posing for. As James Kaplan noted acidly in New York magazine, " What especially got to many people was the images of the boys, scrawny and white-chested, posing like pin-ups, their cK Calvin Klein jeans partially undone. . . . That was really groundbreaking advertising."

The talent, too, was cutting edge. The ad campaign was shot by the well- known photographer Steven Meisel (who is credited, among other work, with the photos in Madonna's Sex book). Meisel in turn made another personnel choice of celebrity interest. As the Washington Post reported later in September:

"When President Clinton railed against those notorious Calvin Klein ads . . . he probably didn't know that the off-camera voice in the television versions belonged to a gentleman named Lou Maletta--aka the Leather Daddy. Since Calvin Klein proclaimed loudly in his defense that there was no pornographic intent to the ads, Maletta was certainly an interesting casting choice. . . . Maletta, 58, is founder and president of the New York- based Gay Cable Network, which produces 'Gay USA,' a news show; 'In the Dungeon,' 'about the New York leather scene'; and 'Men & Films,' which features excerpts from gay porn videos, and for which Maletta's Leather Daddy character was created."

The next day, the Post was forced to publish a correction: At the last minute, and for reasons unclear, Klein himself decided to replace "Leather Daddy" with a professional voice-over actor. Interesting though that decision may be--at the very least, it does seem to imply an awareness on someone's part that there was such a thing as going too far--it is not nearly as significant a choice as that of commissioning Maletta in the first place. What that choice signified was what any sophisticated viewer would already have discerned--that the ads had an obvious man-boy sexual subtext.

The second interesting fact about the outcome of the Klein affair was the inadvertently revealing rationale put forth by company officials. The main idea seemed to be that teenagers are more sexually sophisticated than many adults want to believe. "The message of the cK Calvin Klein jeans current advertising campaign;" as a full-page ad in the New York Times and elsewhere informed the public, was that "young people today, the most media savvy generation yet, have a real strength of character and independence. They have very strongly defined lines of what they will and will not do . . ." It was this very strength, offcials reiterated, that proved discomfiting to the public at large. "The world," as Klein himself told an interviewer shortly after the ads were pulled, "is seeing a reflection of what's really going on."

In a sense, Calvin Klein got it exactly right. All that ground-breaking advertising was indeed reflecting something real, albeit something very different from what the ex-post-facto explanations claimed. What those ads did mirror was something else: the idea that non-adults (particularly if they are boys) are appropriate sex objects for adults (particularly if they are men).

Contrary to what some critics implied at the time, Calvin Klein and his team did not invent the idea of using man-boy sex to grab public attention; they merely submitted it to a commercial plebiscite. Middle America, to the surprise of the fashion moguls, vote d the campaign down. But Middle America has only been one testing ground for revisionist suggestions about pedophilia. Other, more sophisticated venues have proved more willing to give the subject a second look.

'A STEP IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION'

Consider an example from the New York Times, which, in an eerie conjunction, appeared within weeks of the Calvin Klein ad blitz. At the time, as readers may recall, the public fear of pedophile predators was being fanned by the discovery of yet another form of outreach: the home computer. In the preceding months, one 16-year-old boy had run away with bus tickets provided by a chatline "friend"; similar cases of solicitation had become the subjects of FBI investigations; and Congress, heavily pressured by interest groups, had turned its hand to devising legislation that would prevent the exploitation of minors via cyberspace. All in all, it seemed an unlikely moment to suggest that those selfsame chat rooms and bulletin boards had their bright side. But that is exactly what the Times managed to do in a front-page report by Trip Gabriel called "Some On-Line Discoveries Give Gay Youths a Path to Themselves."

Though "a handful of high-profile cases" had "dramatized the threat of on- line predators," wrote Gabriel, kids themselves shared no such fears of the screen. In fact, "all the young users interviewed" for the Times piece "said the threat was exaggerated, adding that they would not be likely to meet blindly with an on-line acquaintance." In fact, if the kids had any fear at all, it seemed to be quite the opposite--that their lines of communication would be shut down by party-pooping parents and legislators. Recent legislation, in particular, this reporter discovered, "has made some gay youths fearful about the future of on-line discussions."

And fearful they should be, if cyberspace is really the lifeline the Times made it out to be. A "distraught youth" in California was "on the verge of suicide" until reaching one "Daniel Cox, 19, a regular on an Internet chat channel dedicated to gay teenagers" at 3 a.m. Cox ministered to the California youth, and the next day "the young man was back on line and doing O.K., Mr. Cox said [emphasis added]." This apparently happens all the time. As another of these selfless dogooders put it--one Michael Handler, "17, a moderator of the Usenet news group for gay youth"--"We want everybody to be who they are and be happy and not kill themselves because they feel they're some sort of abomination."

Another teenager, Ryan Matsuno, "typed out a plaint of loneliness" one night, only to receive "more than 100 supportive E-mail letters" within the next few days--letters that "gave me courage" and "the initiative to go through with telling my mother," according to Master Matsuno. Still another teenager, we are told, used his computer skills to outwit that rarest of things in cyberspace, an actual predator: "Dan Martin, a gay 17-year-old in Fresno, Calif., said he talked for a year on line to a man claiming to be 21. Occasionally the conversation turned to sex. When Mr. Martin suggested a meeting, the man refused and confirmed Mr. Martin's suspicions that he was really middle-aged. 'After I confronted him, I never heard from him again,' Mr. Martin said."

In sum, according to Gabriel, "sites for gay and lesbian youth are the source of some of the most stirring stories in cyberspace."

These touching dramas, the Times report continued, are social-worker approved--certainly by one Frances Kunreuther, director of "a social service agency for gay teenagers in Manhattan," who says, "I think the Internet is a step in the right direction." At the same time, though, the social workers also "cautioned that cyberspace could not substitute for face- to-face contacts." But wait: Aren't face-to-face contacts exactly what most people fear when they think of kids in sex-saturated "chat rooms"? Well, no matter. And no matter too, apparently, that anyone logging on as a teenager could be 17, or 70--or 7. The only thing that matters, or so it appears from reporter Gabriel, is that "the electronic curtain is not a closet"--this, from one Reid Fishler, founder of an Internet site called the "Youth Assistance Organization," who is said to be 19.

'A DANGER TO HIS STUDENTS, OR ONLY TO HIMSELF?'

Another place willing to ask some hard-nosed questions about grownups who are sexually interested in kids is Vanity Fair magazine. For the most part, its glossy pages seem an unlikely territory on which to argue in earnest about anything--much less about anything as obscure as whether a high school teacher obsessed with child pornography was in fact a misunderstood victim himself. Nonetheless, it was in a 1992 issue of Vanity Fair that veteran reporter Jesse Kornbluth published what is probably the most heartfelt and sympathetic portrayal of a convicted child-pornography trafficker yet to appear in expensive print.

"Exeter's Passion Play," as the piece was called, concerned the fate of Larry Lane (or "Lane") Bateman, a tenured teacher at the elite Phillips Exeter Academy who was convicted in October 1992 of possessing and transporting child pornography. The preceding summer, a police raid on his apartment had turned up 33 videotapes of child pornography. The police also found hundreds of pornographic tapes featuring adults--that is to say, men - - and still other tapes made by Exeter students on assignment from Bateman that their teacher had spliced and doctored to his liking (for example, zeroing in on genital areas). Finally, the police also found sophisticated videotaping equipment, some of which belonged to Exeter, later valued at between $ 200,000 and $ 250,000.

As Bateman would later admit to the authorities, he had been involved with child pornography for twenty years--buying it, lending it, going out of his way to get it, and above all, viewing it obsessively. Moreover, at least some of the people in his life were aware that he was deeply involved in pornography of some sort; the Vanity Fair piece itself cites at least two. But the question of who knew what, and when, was mostly irrelevant to Bateman's criminal trial, which centered on four specific counts relating to child pornography. That case rested largely on a single witness named Michael Caven (born Michael Pappas), a one-time student of Bateman's from a high school on Long Island who had now turned chief accuser and informant.

Bateman denied Caven's most damning charges--that he had molested Caven from the age of 16, and that he had taken pornographic pictures of him as a legal minor. But what Bateman could not deny was that in the course of 1990 alone he had sent or given Caven more than 100 pornographic video tapes, and that at least some of these tapes were child pornography. Bateman, for his part, never denied having given Caven child pornography; he only denied having sent those particular tapes through the mail. ("I'm not totally stupid, " he explained at his trial.)

And there was more. According to a pre-sentencing memorandum submitted by the U.S. Attorney's office, boys at Exeter had been filmed in the showers and bedrooms without their knowledge, thanks to one of Bateman's hidden cameras. " The boys," the memo noted, "are either wearing undershorts, towels or nothing. " Also in the memo, according to the New York Times, was the fact that Bateman spliced pieces of the students' tapes into pornographic films. "Mr. Batean," the Times reported, "duplicated tapes made by about 20 students for class onto a master tape, giving each segment a name like 'Blonde Zen Lad' and 'Belt Spanked.'"

Surreptitious filming of students, pornographic tape-making, pornographic tape-editing, pornographic tape-swapping with a former student, pornographic reconstruction of homework videos: Not everyone prizes hobbies like these in a boarding school teacher, with or without that library of kiddie porn on the side. Certainly that was the view adopted at last by Exeter itself, which fired Bateman within 24 hours of his arrest. Something of that view seems also to have been shared by federal district court judge Jose A. Fuste, who in January 1993 sentenced Bateman to five years in prison without parole for one count of possession and two counts of interstate shipment of child pornography--a sentence that, though hardly the maximum allowed by law, was a far cry from leniency. (Under a fourth count, forfeiture, Bateman was also forced to surrender his video equipment.) There was also the influential fact that Bateman showed no remorse whatever for his behavior. As a report in the New York Times put it when the sentence was announced: "He said he still did not understand what was 'so wrong' about what he had done. 'If I strangled a child, if somebody had been hurt, if somebody's property had been destroyed, then there certainly would be a victim,' Mr. Bateman said. 'Where are the victims?'"

Where, indeed? It is that question that reporter Jesse Kornbluth sets out to answer, and the way he answers it will likely take some readers by surprise. For the chief victim of the Bateman affair, as it turns out, was not, say, Michael Caven, or the Exeter students filmed in the showers, or even all those little boys who were somehow made to perform in all those movies with titles like "Ballin' Boys Duo," "Young Mouthful," and "Now, Boys!" No, the chief victim of it all--perhaps even the only victim, if the story told in Vanity Fair is correct--appears to have been Bateman himself.

In the first place, or so at least Kornbluth's essay makes clear, Bateman was a victim of his accuser, Michael Caven (alias Pappas). Caven, the reporter tells us, was a husfier, an alcoholic, a druggie. He exploited rich, older men (including, we are told, Frank Caven, the successful owner of several gay bars who legally adopted his young sex partner in a moment of drunken inspiration).

In fact, throughout Kornbluth's essay, not a kind or empathetic word appears for the man who claimed to have been abused by Bateman as a teenager. But there are, interestingly enough, many, many words from the Pappas/Caven detractors, and Caven is described by a former colleague in the bar business as "a jerk and an egotist. He was media crazy . . . he loved to get his face in any rag in town." Bateman's friends, he reports, "loathe" Michael Caven. " If he wanted to do Lane a favor, he could have said, 'Get help,'" one snaps. " Lane doesn't deserve to have his life ruined."

Second, or so it appears on this telling, Bateman was the victim of the " brutality" and "frosty environment" of Exeter itself. (This turn looks ironic, for under Kendra O'Donnell, who was appointed principal in 1987, the school would seem to have entered a progressive warming phase; it was under O'Donnell, for example, that Exeter--which now boasts a Gay/Straight Alliance--invited gay alumni to come and speak to the students about their sexuality.) Surely Bateman's firing was hypocritical; after all, we are talking about Exonians, who in Kornbluth's telling at least are a worldly- wise and sexually sophisticated bunch. "The idea that single male teachers might be homosexual and appreciate young men," he writes of these preppies, " would not be a soul-shattering revelation to Exeter students."

And, of course, the hapless Bateman was also a victim of a society that forces homosexuals to act furtively. When faced with the conservatism of Exeter, where "only one instructor has come out," Lane Bateman stayed in the closet. And it was all that time in the closet, it is argued here, that led to his taste for child pornography. "'It's not healthy to be so secretive, but Lane never felt secure enough at Exeter to come out,' explains a friend who has long known of Bateman's interest in pornography. . . . 'He's heavy into fantasy. These sex movies are the legacy of the closet.'"

In case the reader misses the point, Bateman is also provided an opportunity to expound on it himself.

"Bateman says he purchased the material that ultimately brought him down several years before he started teaching at Exeter, when he was coming out of the closet and wanted to make up for lost time. 'For a few years, you could buy anything, and I bought some films and books that featured young boys,' he says. 'For me, these pictures were aesthetic, not pornographic. I know people say, these images are despicable--how can you think that? But the key point is that I identified with the boys, not the men. If someone young had grabbed me when I was that age and said, "Let me teach you something," I would have said, 'Sure.'"

And here, as with the example of Calvin Klein, we come to the real heart of pedophilia chic: It's about boys. It is boys and boys alone who are seen as fair sexual game. For if Bateman's cache of child pornography had featured little girls, rather than little boys, it is unthinkable that he would have become the object of a sympathetic profile in the likes of Vanity Fair. That a teacher whose sexual tastes run to boys rather than girls could come to command a cultural dispensation for that preference--this, rather than the "legacy of the closet," would seem to be the "deeper meaning" of the scandal at Exeter.

Biased though it was in favor of Lane Bateman, and much as it seemed to suggest that child pornography may be a victimless crime, the Vanity Fair piece at least stopped short of endorsing either child pornography or pedophilia per se. It is an amazing fact that these omissions would come to seem positively retrograde in light of an essay appearing two and half years later in yet another stylish, widely circulated magazine, the New Republic.

A GOOD WORD FOR NAMBLA

The most overt attempt by a hip journal to give pedophiles a place at the table came in the form of a May 8, 1995, "Washington Diarist" in the New Republic by Hanna Rosin entitled "Chickenhawk." Ostensibly inspired by a " riveting" documentary of the same name about the North American Man-Boy Love Association, "Chickenhawk" opens with the following quote from the film's star, a real-life pedophile named Leyland Stevenson: "He's just like a flower in bloom. He's at that perfect stage, in which he is hermaphroditic. . . . He's in that wonderful limbo between being a child and an adolescent--he's certainly an adolescent, but he has that weird feminine grace about him."

Stevenson, of course, is talking about a little boy. It is a quote intended to jolt the reader, and no doubt for most readers it still does. Having already invited the reader to imagine a child as seen through the eyes of a pedophile, Rosin then proceeds to something more avant-garde still: a chatty review of man-boy love and of the North American Man-Boy Love Association (whose informal motto, as some readers may know, is "Eight is too late").

"Chickenhawk," the author explains, "is worth seeing" because it " succeeds, at least partially, in making monsters human." Though it may be true that Leyland Stevenson is "every mother's worst nightmare," it is also true--at least true according to Hanna Rosin--that Stevenson and his fellow NAMBLA members have gotten an unnecessarily bad rap. "There are no steamy orgies" in the documentary, she notes dryly, "or bound-up boys languishing in NAMBLA's basement." NAMBLA itself, she casually explains, "functions mainly as a support group for fantasizers, with the requisite forums for victim-bonding." Like members of any other group united by common interests, its rank and file have their humdrum clubby moments; they hold roundtables (where they "hug and share persecution stories"), solicit subscriptions, exchange "bulletins." Not only are these activities benign, it seems, but their propriety is enforced by the club itself. "Group policy," we are assured, "strictly forbids contact with live boys or even illicit pictures on the premises."

Next, Rosin praises NAMBLA's "bravery." "After all," she writes, "it is still heresy even to consider the possibility of the legitimacy of their feelings." Today's pedophiles, she reminds us, live in especially unfriendly times. Politically, things could hardly be worse; witness the tough language on child pornography in the Contract with America. Even President Clinton, she notes sarcastically, "was cowed into taking a courageous stand against 'softness on child pornography.'" Yet NAMBLA, despite it all, continues pluckily on: "keeping all their activities above board"--even publishing their New York phone number.

Just as the grownups of NAMBLA turn out to be more innocent than one might expect, the boys, for their part, seem to be far more sophisticated. As Rosin reasons, "it might even be that a budding young stud had the upper hand over the aging, overweight loner." And how old does a boy have to be, in the Rosin/ NAMBLA view, to qualify for "budding young stud" status? Sixteen? Fourteen? Twelve? No? Well, how about ten?

One NAMBLA member in his 20s, an enticing blond with slits for blue eyes, describes a sexual experience he had with a karate instructor when he was 10. "I came on to him. I knew what I was doing. I felt very empowered. I felt I controlled the relationship, which is a good thing for a kid. It dispels the belief that adults are always in power in such relationships. You know, I led him around. I was the one in power."

Well, boys just want to have fun--or, as the New Republic seems to have it, just boys want to have fun. It is "plausible," Rosin muses, that "a teenage boy [emphasis added] might agree to sex with an older man." Similarly, though she notes approvingly that, for example, the age of consent in the Netherlands is twelve, she nowhere advocates changing the age-of- consent laws for girls. And she certainly shies away from suggesting that the figure of the "budding young stud" might be interchangeable with that of a " budding young slut"--a phrase whose appearance would surely have incurred the wrath of a good many New Republic readers. "Chickenhawk" itself, interestingly enough, passed almost without comment from those same subscribers.

'KIDS WANT TO PLEASE YOU'

Actually, these latest attempts to manage a good word for pedophilia are not quite as au courant as they first appear. Similar themes have been floated for years by a number of self-described, self-consciously gay writers--and not only by those on the cultural fringe, but by several who have crossed over to the mainstream literary market.

Perhaps the most prominent of these writers is the acclaimed novelist and essayist Edmund White. The author of a number of enthusiastically received novels--"Forgetting Elena," "A Boy's Own Story," and "The Beautiful Room Is Empty"--White has also had a brilliant career as an editor and essayist. He has worked at Saturday Review and Horizon, been a contributing editor to Vogue and House and Garden, and written for publications ranging from the New York Times Magazine to Christopher Street. In 1980, a number of his pieces reflecting on post-liberation gay life were collected into yet another critically acclaimed book called "States of Desire: Travels in Gay America."

On account of its historical timing alone--the book amounts to a city-by- city celebration of gay life published on the very eve of the identification of AIDS--"States of Desire" remains a fascinating and retrospectively poignant sociological document. But it is a work that deserves to be remembered for something else as well: It is probably the most critically acclaimed piece of reportage in which the taboo against pedophilia has been examined at considerable length and judged archaic--a judgment that moreover passed virtually without comment from White's admiring critics. Throughout most of this reflection, White studiously keeps to an Olympian "on the one hand this, on the other hand that" rhetorical monologue--in which one hand, as in most such monologues, consistently manages to get the better of the other.

Pedophilia, White asserts at the outset of this discussion, is "the most controversial issue" in the lives of many in the gay movement. It is also, the reader is led to understand, a terribly complicated subject. As one gay man--ostensibly not himself a pedophile--puts it in words that the author quotes approvingly, "There's no way to answer it [the issue of pedophilia] without exploring it. We need information and time for deliberation. There are no clear answers--who would provide them?"

White is willing to try. "Those who oppose pedophilia," he posits, "argue that the "consent" or seeming cooperation of an eight-year-old is meaningless. " On the other hand, "those who defend pedophilia reply that children are capable, from infancy on, of showing reluctance." Similarly, "critics of pedophilia contend that children are easily manipulated by adults--through threats, through actual force, through verbal coercion, through money." Here again, the other side is allowed the last--and longest--word:

"Champions of pedophilia (and many other people) argue that children are already exploited by adults in our society--they are bullied by their parents, kept in financial and legal subjugation, frequently battered. And they have little legal recourse in attempting to escape punitive adults. . . . They can't vote, they can't drink, they can't run away, they can't enter certain movie theaters, they can't refuse to go to school, they can't disobey curfew laws--and they can't determine their own sexual needs and preferences. Pedophiles find it ironic that our society should be so worked up over the issue of sexual exploitation of children and so unconcerned with all other (and possibly more damaging) forms of exploitation. If anything, the pedophiles argue, sex may be the one way in which children can win serious consideration from adults and function with them on an equal plane; if a child is your lover, you will treat him with respect. [emphasis added]"

And where does our narrator locate himself between these camps? "I am not in the business of recommending guidelines for sex with youngsters," he writes coyly, for "I simply haven't gathered enough information about the various issues involved." At the same time, though--or so the author insists--"the question of sex with children remains"; and White makes a final attempt to get to the bottom of it by interviewing an actual pedophile in a bar in Boston.

This man, the author coolly reports, "has a lover of twelve (he met him when the boy was six)." Far from the voracious predator so feared by the general public, however, our pedophile could scarcely appear more ethereal. He is "thirty-six, dressed in faded denims, his face as innocent and mournful as Petrouchka's. His voice was breathy and light, his manner anxious and almost humble." Lest there be any last doubt of this man's suitability for polite company, White erases it with the ultimate compliment. "I was," he writes candidly, "strongly attracted to him."

There follows a conversation in which the amorous adventures of White's pedophile are fondly recounted. White asks how the man met his present "lover, " and the pedophile replies: "At the beach. He was there with his mother. He came over to me and started talking. You see, the kids must make all the moves." In case that point has been missed, White reiterates it a few lines later, this time asking explicitly: "Did your friend take the sexual initiative with you?" "Absolutely," Petrouchka affirms, adding, "I've been into kids since I was twenty-two, and in every case the kids were the aggressors."

"What do you two do in bed?" White next inquires. There follows a graphic description, which the pedophile concludes on a mournful note. For there is, as it turns out here, at least one problem with man-boy love that most readers may not have anticipated: namely, that the kids are too loving. " My last lover," the pedophile explains, "told me that he didn't like getting f--d. 'Why didn't you tell me?' I asked. 'Because you liked it so much--I wanted to please you.' That's the problem; kids want to please you."

A second writer who has explicitly addressed the matter of men and boys, this time adolescents, is Larry Kramer, author of the hugely celebrated AIDS play "The Normal Heart" and of an earlier novel called "Faggots" (1978), one of the classics of the postliberation gay genre. The comparison between Kramer and White is particularly useful insofar as the two authors differ markedly in a number of important ways. Kramer's authorial perspective, as well as his political persona (he is a well-known activist and co-founder of the New York Gay Men's Health Crisis), have made him something of an anomaly in his chosen circles. Between the 1970s and the dawn of AIDS, at a time when most gay figures were proclaiming the joys of post-Stonewall "liberation," Kramer, for his part, was nearly alone in emphasizing its dark side. "Faggots," for example--a controversial book then and now concerns the plight of a man looking for homosexual love in the hedonistic heyday of Manhattan and Fire Island. Kramer includes a number of scenes in which older men drug, flatter, and seduce teenage boys. Most prominent among these is a 16-year-old named Timmy, who is initiated into the high life at a party by a series of experienced men and finally "devoured" by ten at one time. In the course of this brutal description--one of several in the book involving adolescent boys--Kramer repeatedly invokes the appeal of Timmy's "beauty," his "teenage skin," his status as "forbidden fruit." One by one, the men at the party succumb to Timmy's charms, including even the most macho of them all ("the Winston Man"), who finds himself "excited in a way that he has not been since" high school.

Timmy's fate in the course of the book, it should be added, is not a happy one. Is Kramer implying that such is the price paid for decadence, or is there tacit empathy in his depictions of Timmy's many would-be "fathers"? It is left to the reader to guess. Much less ambiguous, at any rate, is the role played by Timmy and other "youngsters" in the world that "Faggots" portrays.

Another celebrated gay author who broached the subject of sex with minors is the late Paul Monette. Monette's 1988 book "Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir" garnered a National Book Critics Circle Award nomination and was acclaimed by many as "one of the most eloquent works to come out of the AIDS epidemic" (USA Today). His 1992 book "Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story" won the National Book Award. It is in this volume that Monette, like Edmund White before him, puts forth what would once have been a controversial thesis about the sexual wants of prepubescent boys. "Nine is not too young to feel the tribal call," he notes early on while recollecting his own childhood adventures with a boy his age. "Nine and a half is old enough," he repeats later, adding the by-now familiar note that "for me at least, it was a victory of innocence over a world of oppression."

Several chapters later, while reminiscing about an aborted affair he had with a high-school student while teaching at a boarding school, Monette sounds another theme that once would have been guaranteed to shock: that of the predatory, empowered adolescent. "Behind the gritted teeth of passion," writes the author of his first sexual encounter with a particular boy, "I heard the ripple of laughter, so one of us must have been having fun. Must've been Greg, for I was too busy feeding on sin and death to play."

"It was Greg who always chose the time," he continues, adding dramatically, "I stood ready to drop whatever I was doing. . . . I lived in thrall to Greg's unpredictable needs."

That is not to say that Monette, at the time, felt himself relieved of responsibility for the affair--far from it. "If I am particular about the fact of being seduced--putting it all on him, the will and the dare and then the control--it doesn't mean I didn't feel the guilt. . . . I had become the thing the heteros secretly believe about everyone gay--a predator, a recruiter, an indoctrinator of boys into acts of darkness." But this self-recrimination, he goes on to reveal, was simply false consciousness. For finally, "I don't think that now. Twenty years of listening to gay men recount their own adolescent seductions of older guys has put it all in a different light."

Have all these trial balloons just passed without comment over the public head? One of the few critics to have taken notice is Bruce Bawer, who in his 1993 book "A Place at the Table" castigates Edmund White in particular for his advocacy of man-boy sex. Such radicalism, Bawer argues, is part of the twisted legacy of the closet--a legacy that has forced "subculture" writers like White to evermore in-your-face positions on account of their oppression by the rest of society.

But writers have from time immemorial endured oppression--including jail time and execution--without leaping to the defense of pedophilia. And what kind of "oppression" is it, exactly, that confers fame, fortune, critical raves, national awards, and--in the case of Edmund White--a Guggenheim fellowship and anointment as a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres?

PEDOPHILE SCIENCE

Actually, even the likes of White were being more derivative than they would ever like to believe. Hands down, if you'll pardon the expression, the real big daddy of pedophilia chic could only be the long-dead Alfred C. Kinsey. As Judith A. Reisman and Edward W. Eichel point out in their 1990 expose "Kinsey, Sex and Fraud," "It is Kinsey's work which established the notion of "normal" childhood sexual desire"--a notion that, as their book documents, was field-tested on the bodies of hundreds of children, most of them boys, in ways that might today be considered imprisonable offenses.

How did Kinsey and his team get away with it? "As we can see now," wrote Tom Bethell in his excellent review of the Kinsey facts for the May 1996 American Spectator, "science had vast prestige at the time and Kinsey exploited it. Any perversion could be concealed beneath the scientist's smock and the posture of detached observation."

Yet if Kinsey is now suffering a public disrobing, his intellectual heirs display their researches still. For a final model of pedophilia chic--this one tricked out with all the requisite charts, tables, models, and talk of methodology--consider a volume published in 1993 by Prometheus Books. As its name seems to suggest, Prometheus is a publishing house of cutting-edge aspiration, whose backlist reveals its focus on issues like paranormal psychology, freethinking, and humanism. And, oh yes, a trans-Atlantic exploration of the virtues of pederasty called Children's Sexual Encounters with Adults: A Scientific Study, by a trio identified as C.K. Li ("a clinical psychologist in Paisley, Scotland"), D.J. West ("Emeritus Professor of Clinical Criminology at Cambridge University"), and T.P Woodhouse ("a criminological research worker in Ealing, England").

Like our other pioneering looks at sex with kiddies, Children's Sexual Encounters with Adults is sexually biased, concentrating as it does on the " startling contrast" between boys and girls when it comes to sex with grownups. ("Surveys," as the authors explain at some length, "find that on the whole boys are less likely than girls to experience bad effects attributable to sexual incidents with adults.") It is not sexual contacts per se that pose problems for children, the authors argue, but rather the cultural prejudices by which most members of society judge such acts. "The damaging effects on children of intimate but non-penetrative contacts with adults," note the authors in a section on "cultural relativity,. . . . are clearly psychological rather than physical and to a considerable extent dependent upon how such situations are viewed in the society in which the child has been brought up."

Again, and as Hanna Rosin and NAMBLA fans everywhere will appreciate, the study also emphasizes the positive side of man-boy love for the boy in question. As one typical paragraph has it:

"There is a considerable amount of evidence that some boys are quite happy in relationships with adult homosexual men so long as the affair does not come to light and cause scandal or police action. . . . The great majority [of boys in a 1987 'study'] came from apparently normal homes, but were pleased to have additional attention and patronage from a devoted adult and willingly went along with his sexual requirements."

Parents everywhere will be relieved to learn that pedophiles themselves are not the predators of popular imaginings, but congenial well-wishers much like Edmund White's alluring Petrouchka. "Men who approach boys," the social scientists write in conclusion, "are generally looking for what amounts to a love relationship." Thus, "they employ gradual and gentle persuasion. The average pederast is no more seeking a rape-style confrontation than is the average heterosexual when looking for a congenial adult partner . . ."

At a time when almost every kind of advocacy comes equipped with statistical batteries, it should come as no surprise that pedophiles and their allies, too, have acquired their own pseudo-scientific apparatus. Only the unsophisticated would be surprised to find such a numerological polemic put forward by a reputable publishing house and advertised in the Barnes and Noble book catalog. But then, only the unsophisticated stand in need of the reeducation its pages offer. And there, to return to the figure of Larry Don McQuay, is where the matter of pedophilia chic would seem to stand. In one corner, enraged parents from across the country screaming for help in protecting their children; in the other, desiccated salonistes who have taken to wondering languidly whether a taste for children's flesh is really so indefensible after all. And they wonder why there's a culture war.

Mary Eberstadt is adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute.

Ruth Institute Podcast, November 14, 2011

Dr. Jennifer Morse speaks with Dr. Donald Hilton in this podcast from the Ruth Institute, also aired on Catholic Radio of San Diego. Topics covered include: addiction, adrenaline, dopamine, Delta FosB, oxytocin, bonding, marriage, Kinsey, AASECT, the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM), Twelve-Step Programs.

See also:

Erototoxin
Pornography addiction: A neuroscience perspective
Can pornography use become an actual brain addiction?
Slave Master

By Howard Erickson

Tragically, since the early 1960s, a primary contributor to the sexual education of numerous young people has been magazines like Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler. These so-called "adult" magazines are not read only by adults, and the degrading philosophies of life portrayed within their pages negatively affect proper development of a person's sexual mores.

A recent study by Dr. Judith Reisman (see February 1987 FJ) accentuates the rising influence pornography has in the United States, and graphically reveals the extent to which sex magazines have gone in their portrayal of immorality. Reisman was requested to do this in-depth study by the U.S. Department of Justice. What she discovered shocked her, and she assumed that the subsequent report would result in harsh actions against distributors of pornographic material. Instead, the report was downplayed and openly criticized, she lost her job at a prominent university, and she has been swept into an unbelievable controversy. The Department of Justice even went as far as to claim it would be a crime to distribute the report, citing 18 U.S.C. Sec. 2251-2252 pertaining to criminal penalties for certain acts involving sexual exploitation of children.

Reisman immediately asked, "Why is it a crime to publish the explicit contents of this report, and not a crime for the magazines on which this report is based?" In her opinion, the Department of Justice squelched this report because of the powerful, and growing, sex industry lobby.

What did her report uncover that powerful forces did not want revealed? Reisman's content analysis of leading pornographic distributors, Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler magazines, all legally sold over the counter, uncovered some surprising information, the most amazing being the number of depictions of child pornography.

In the issues studied, Reisman found almost 3,000 photographs and over 2,000 illustrations and cartoons depicting sexual themes involving children. One cartoon showed a teenage girl, naked from the waist down, talking on the telephone. The caption read, "I'd love to go, but my dad has extra chores for me tonight." She stated that many of these cartoons and photos also justified drugs and violence. While Playboy and Penthouse might claim their magazines are free of such graphic depictions, Reisman found there was nothing in Hustler, "which is more colorful and graphic if you will," that was not proceeded or followed in these two magazines.

Identifying the sex industry as more of a sex/drug cartel, Reisman believes these magazines are influential in promoting a lifestyle that has a strong negative affect on society. She notes that attempts to reform marijuana laws have long been underwritten by Playboy.

Reisman feels this report is neglected because many prominent and reputable people appear in the interview and "journalism" sections of these magazines, people who would rather not be identified with child pornography, and thus overlook this assessment or declare it false.

However, since the report came out at least 500 stores or chains have stopped selling these magazines. Southland Corporation, owner of 7-Elevens, used this report as the basis for their decision.

To obtain copies of this report, send at least two dollars to the Institute for Media Education, Box 7404, Arlington, Virginia 22207.

By Martin Mawyer

Judith Reisman has finished her study of Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler magazines. It is full of complicated phrases: "child magnets," "psuedo-children," "adult receiver," "pairing of stimuli," and "child/adult juxtaposition."

What?

A dictionary will not help. A remedial English course would be useless. And a degree in syntactics would be a waste of time. But don't worry, when all the scholarly verbiage is stripped away, the conclusion of the report is quite simple: The nation's most popular pornographic magazines promote the sexual and violent abuse of children.

In a study funded by the Department of Justice, and which took nearly two years to complete, Reisman researched 373 issues of Playboy, 184 issues of Penthouse, and 126 issues of Hustler magazines.

Her findings?

Children were depicted in photos, illustrations, and cartoons 6,004 times!

"I had anticipated only half that number when we started the study," Reisman said. "And I was very shocked that children had emerged in these magazines so early--that they were there in 1954. That shocked me."

"These materials have been validating the concept of the child as being seductive and wanting sex with adults."

Reisman was referring to a 1954 Playboy issue that depicted a small boy offering money to a naked woman in bed for sex.

"Even if the children in these magazines were neutral--that is, even if they were in little dresses and gowns and tops and were not committing sexual acts--that would be of enough concern. But we found that of the 6,004 images, the majority showed children in a sexual or violent context.

"These children were much more likely to be associated with having sex with adults. And the children were portrayed as unharmed and enjoying the sexual interactions.

"I was very shocked that children had emerged in these magazines so early--that they were there in 1954."

Among the 6,004 child depictions:

• 1,675 children were either nude or displayed with a naked adult.
• 1,225 children were involved in some type of genital activity.
• 989 children were involved in sexual activity with adults.
• 792 adults were portrayed as psuedo-children, that is, adults were dressed to appear as children.
• 592 children were featured in violent or forceful situations.
• 267 children were associated with animals or objects
  

"All of this is communication," Reisman said. "All of this is education--an education that has been delivered to this society for over 30 years.

"The core of that education is this: Children are seductive and craving for sex.

"These materials have been validating--over and over, month after month--the concept of the child as being seductive and wanting sex with adults. This is not accurate sex information. But it is the sex education that these magazines have delivered for three decades."

But when the statistics and numbers are swept aside, what did Reisman find? One of the most disturbing findings was the use of psuedo-children in the magazines.

On the front cover Playboy's April 1976 issue, for instance, an adult female is dressed in a party skirt, holding a stuffed rabbit, surrounded by rag dolls and teddy bears, sitting in a white rocking chair, and wearing Mary-Jane shoes. She is wearing nothing from the waist up.

Typically, the producers of the magazines have a number of ways of displaying the psuedo-child. The adult may either be in diapers, a fetal position, an oversized rocking chair, or sucking on a finger or thumb. More often, the adult is surrounded by children's objects--Fisher-Price toys, baby bottles, coloring books, toy trains, lots of stuffed animals. Occasionally, the adult is cast in a fairy-tale setting. One of the more elaborate--and expensive--fairy-tale settings appeared in a Hustler publication. The setting was titled, "In the Land of Aaahs." The scenario showed Dorothy (of the fictional classic "Wizard of Oz") in many sexually explicit interactions with the Lion, Tin Man, and Straw Man.

Reisman believes that displaying children--or adults dressed as children--in these magazines tends to create a sexual arousal for real children. In more technical terms, Reisman says, "The presence of children in a sexually explicit context is very dangerous. The pairing of stimuli can potentiate an arousal to the one stimuli when the other is not present."

Another disturbing finding is the apparent callousness the magazines displayed toward the violent sexual abuse of children. For instance, in an August 1975 issue of Playboy, and advertisement for OUI magazine (owned by Playboy at that time) stated: "How One Family Solved Its Discipline Problem." Pictured above this heading is a naked young girl hand-cuffed and sitting on a bed with unusually battered bedposts. The text reads: "This is Jane. When she is nice, she is very, very nice. But when she is naughty, she has to be punished. Lately, Jane has been very, very naughty.

"That's why, in the current issue of OUI magazine, Jane is pictured in a variety of poses that restrict here movement. It was movement that got Jane into trouble in the first place. So you see, it's for here own good. And not incidentally, your pleasure."

The advertisement suggests sadomasochistic sex toward siblings.

Equally revolting are the numerous cartoons that desecrate children.

In a Penthouse (December 1997) cartoon, a toddler is shown splattered on the floor, riddled with bullet holes. Santa stands above him, holding a machine gun, and saying, "That'll teach you to be a good boy."

"If the public becomes aware of what we have found, we will see a dramatic change in the acceptability of these magazines."

In Hustler's December 1976 issue a doctor is shown crushing an infant with his hands after a woman has just given birth. The doctor asks the mother, "So, you can't pay your bill, heh, Mrs. Jones?"

Other disturbing findings include incest in cartoons and pictorials (two such examples include the features, "Father Knows Best" in Playboy, and "Mother and Daughter" in Penthouse); the use of fairy-tale themes in cartoons--including Peter Pan, Santa Claus, Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood; and the promotion of bestiality, sadomasochism, and drugs. For example, a Playboy satire on the Boy Scouts suggests a merit badge for "free-basing."

Reisman's report (which bears an exhaustive government title, "Images of Children, Crime and Violence in Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler") recommends that her findings be disseminated to public agencies, educators, policymakers, parents and juveniles.

"If the public becomes aware of what we have found in these magazines, we will see a dramatic change in the acceptability of these magazines," Reisman said.

She predicted, "I think we would see a tremendous boycott. I think we would see an overwhelming response by the public to take action. We would see communities protecting themselves from these kinds of materials. This report has the potential of fermenting a tremendous amount of community concern and change."

Dr. Judith A. Reisman, in a study funded by the Justice Department, has reported that Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler magazines--the country's three top-selling magazines of erotic literature--are responsible for promoting children as sexual objects.

"From the very beginning, since 1954 (when Playboy released its first issue), children have appeared in sexual contexts with adults in these magazines," Dr. Reisman reported.

As a whole, the magazines typically begin by using cartoons of children in sexual or violent situations.

The number of cartoons depicting children as either the recipients or initiators of sex or violence total 1,854 illustrations among the three magazines.

After a period of time the magazines use "pseudo-children"--nude models over l8-years of age--to portray young children in sexual contexts.

A "pseudo-child" is designated as such if the photo spread depicts the child in pigtails, oversize shoes, sucking her thumb, with baby dolls or teddy bears by her side, wearing bobby socks, sitting on an oversize chair, or wearing diapers, among a variety of other props depicting childhood.

Over the past three decades (32 years for Playboy, 16 years for Penthouse, and 11 years for Hustler), the magazines have carried 681 pseudo-children photo spreads.

"In summary," Dr. Reisman reported, "over 6,000 depictions of children were found in these three magazines alone from 1954-1984."

Sexual Sabotage is an impossible read. It is, however, an essential read. The 400 pages are packed with closely documented factual material on the orchestration of the post- World War II sexual revolution through corruption of research and education by the 'Sex Industrial Complex' backed by high financial interests.

Judith Reisman demonstrates with complete clarity that the sexual revolution of the last five decades of the twentieth century was deliberately generated by a pack of lies presented as academic research at the corporate and publically funded Kinsey Institute of Indiana University. That 'pack of lies' includes seriously flawed research data, interwoven with pornography, paedophilia and other perversions now classified as within the broad range of human sexual behaviour. Make no mistake: says the author:

Alfred. C. Kinsey was the most effective and deviant sexual philosopher in human history. He was the first acclaimed American scientist to insist that virginity is unhealthy, promiscuity helps marriages, pornography is constructive, obsessive masturbation and bestiality are never problematic, bi/homosexual sex acts are normal, and children are 'sexual from birth' and appropriate sex partners for adults. On and on for sixty years. (301)

Over that period, sex, drugs and pop culture have come to be accepted as normal in America. Sexual Sabotage is the history of an engineered change in culture and customary practices over the final decades of the twentieth century. Far from being the result of a common desire for greater freedom from moral restraints, change is shown to have been orchestrated by collusion between the big pharmaceutical companies, the press and the media, led by the Kinsey Institute and the other corrupt and corrupting academic institutions. It is possible to check the commonly available hard statistical data before and after the publication of the Kinsey reports. Before World War II statistics show violence, rape, child abuse, venereal disease and divorce to have been less common. Post-Kinsey, all measures show that the incidence of rape, violence, child abuse, divorce, sexually transmitted disease, illegitimacy, teenage pregnancy and abortion have escalated. What emerges from Judith Reisman's evidence is that the breakdown in social standards was deliberately cultured by vested interests through the media, legislation and educational establishments.

So - who was Kinsey? Alfred Charles Kinsey (1894 -1956) was an American biologist and professor of entomology and zoology. Kinsey's original research into human sexuality was originally funded by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations. The same sponsors enabled Kinsey to found the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University, now known as the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. The Kinsey Reports on The Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953) founded the modern field of sexology, the values-free 'scientific' study of human sexuality. The notion that physical relationships between human beings, i.e., the quest for physical pleasure from using the body of another, could be studied 'scientifically' aroused great controversy in the 1940s and 1950s. Judith Reisman shows how the bogus research findings of the Kinsey Institute and the establishment of training courses in sexology for health care professionals in other educational establishments has created a social climate in which the study of sexually deviant behaviour in the name of 'science' has become culturally acceptable. Judith Reisman demonstrates that Kinsey's scientifically and morally unsound research encouraged the popularization of pornography, promiscuity and paedophilia, and the commodification of children and sexuality. Failure to examine the original studies dispassionately implicates contemporary academics, social scientists, educationalists and other career professionals in the creation of a society in which vulnerable children and young people are increasingly physically and morally at risk. With over 1,100 references, Sexual Sabotage carries ample evidence of the need for a rigorous investigation of the authenticity of 'scientific' investigations of the Kinsey Institute.

Undoubtedly, the Kinsey Institute profoundly influenced social and cultural values. The establishment of Playboy and other pornographic publications followed directly from the Kinsey research publications, whilst academic research into all manner of sexual awareness and artificial arousal has been funded by the pornographic and pharmaceutical institutional networks. Far from being innocent, artificial sexual stimulation is addictive.

The author of Sexual Sabotage could best be described as the whistle-blower par excellence. Inevitably, she has been criticized as using unsubstantiated data to promote a reactionary right-wing agenda. Comparison of these scurrilous attacks with the book itself shows them up as part of the same agenda which laid the foundations for the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction during the late 1930s. From the outset, that agenda was neither bias-free nor scientifically objective. This raises the further question - how was this original research funded, and why? Judith Reisman traces the interconnections between the funding of the research and the control of the mass media which was essential to the success of the original venture:

Indiana University also provided financial support before, during and after Kinsey published the work. And the university's patron, the Rockefeller Foundation, provided resources to prepare and carry out a substantial blitzkrieg. As the first book's publication date approached, Indiana University wined and dined the most prominent reporters - supposedly objective journalists who then agreed to let Kinsey read and approve their articles prior to publication. ... (p72)

This raises further questions. Had four-year-old Alfred C. Kinsey met with an accident which he failed to survive, would the sexual revolution of the post-World War II period never have materialized? Would the course of social history have been entirely different? Or would some other individual have been sponsored by the same powerful corporate interests to pursue the same research agenda? If the answer to the latter question is, 'Yes!' One is left wondering - where did the impetus to degrade human morals in this way come from? Specifically, where did the finance originate to fund research into the 'science' of human sexuality? Why was money made available for education in sexology to be introduced in schools, colleges and universities across the world, when so many subjects are eliminated from the curriculum for lack of funds? Sexual Sabotage raises questions which cannot rightly be left unanswered.

Sexual Sabotage: How One Mad Scientist Unleashed a Plague of Corruption and Contagion on America, by Judith A. Reisman, WND Books (2010), ISBN: 978-1935071853

Dr. Judith Reisman, a Visiting Professor with Liberty University School of Law, was invited to give a presentation in Rome this week to a large audience of Roman Catholic clergy, officials, scholars and Catholic laity.

Reisman presented her research on the fallacy of Alfred Kinsey's reports of human sexuality as well as her findings of systemic child sexploitation launched by Playboy as early as 1954.

Kinsey, an American biologist, is known for laying the foundation for the modern field of sexology. His studies created much controversy in the 1940s and 1950s. His first book on human sexuality was published in 1948, and is sometimes referred to as the "K-Bomb," said Mat Staver, the law school's dean.

After Rome, Reisman will be lecturing throughout Europe on the Kinseyan origin of harmful "sex education" programs ending with a paper at the University of London, "Playboy Markets Tweens For the Global Sex Industry," co-authored by Liberty Council's Mary McAlister.

"Because of her extensive knowledge, Dr. Reisman's services are in high demand," Staver said. "We are pleased to have her on the faculty of the law school. She is thrilled to be in a position to train a new generation of champions."

Reisman has been a consultant to four U.S. Department of Justice administrations, the U.S. Department of Education, as well as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. She is a news commentator for WorldNetDaily.com and was the Principal Investigator and author of the U.S. Department of Justice, Juvenile Justice study, "Images of Children, Crime and Violence in Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler" (1989), "Kinsey, Sex and Fraud" (Reisman, et al., 1990) and Soft Porn Plays Hardball (1991); "Partner Solicitation Language as a Reflection of Male Sexual Orientation" (w/Johnson, 1995); and "Kinsey, Crimes & Consequences" (1998, 2000) and Sexual Sabotage (2010).