by Richard Beck
Complaints about the politicization of scientific debate, however, did little to defuse the larger debates about abuse and childhood sexuality, and so when the University of Minnesota published Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex by the journalist and abortion rights activist Judith Levine in 2002, the controversy was ready to replay itself. “At the turn of the twenty-first century,” Levine wrote, “America is being inundated by censorship in the name of protecting ‘children’ from ‘sex,’ both terms capaciously defined.”54 She argued that after a period of sexual optimism in the 1960s and 1970s, American culture had spent more than twenty years focusing on the moral and medical dangers of sex: disease, unwanted pregnancy, strangers with candy, porn. This shift had been particularly pronounced in discussions of childhood sexuality. Although earlier decades had seen the publication of a number of books designed to explain various aspects of sex to children with straightforward friendliness (one described an orgasm as like “climbing up the ladder of a long slide and then whooshing down”), recent guides spent more time dramatizing all that could go wrong. Levine noted that almost every sex-ed curriculum includes a list of reasons why someone might want to have sex, which students are often asked to brainstorm. She cited one list’s collection of possible answers, which included “to hold onto a relationship,” “to get affection,” “to show that they are ‘grown up,’” and so forth. Levine noted one reason not included on this list “or almost any other”: because it feels good.55
The practical and lighthearted tone in which Levine delivered her various recommendations and reassurances was clearly designed to serve the book’s larger goal: to dispel the climate of fear that surrounded all public discussions of children and sex. Following naturally from this goal was a belief that in order for society to approach adolescent sexuality with less anxiety, it would be necessary to entrust adolescents themselves with some measure of freedom to make their own decisions about sex. Levine suggested that age of consent laws be recast in a Dutch mold. This meant providing people between the ages of twelve and fifteen with the right to consent to sex while also allowing them to “employ a statutory consent age of sixteen if they felt they were being coerced or exploited.” In addition, parents could step in and forbid a child’s relationship with an adult, but only if they were able to persuade a special council that it really was in the child’s best interest. Such a system, Levine wrote, would “balance the subjective experience and the rights of young people against the responsibility and prerogative of adults to look after their best interests.”56
One can imagine how this suggestion went over. The University of Minnesota Press was deluged with more than eight hundred angry phone calls and e-mails even before Harmful to Minors had been shipped to retail outlets, meaning that the letters were written by people who could not possibly have read the book. The conservative state legislature also threatened to revoke funding from the publisher’s parent university. Levine became the object of heated personal attacks. Robert Knight, a conservative activist affiliated with the group Concerned Women for America, described Levine’s book as “every child molester’s dream and every parent’s nightmare.”57
Although a George W. Bush–era debate about the sexual rights of teenagers and 1980s arguments about the existence of satanic pedophile cults might appear to be related to one other in only a distant way, it was not a coincidence that they attracted some of the same participants. One group involved in the attacks on Harmful to Minors was the Leadership Council for Mental Health, Justice, and the Media, an organization of therapists and other professionals that formed as recovered memory patients began to file malpractice lawsuits in the 1990s. Richard Kluft, Frank Putnam, Bessel van der Kolk, and other high-profile proponents of MPD—which had since been rebranded as Dissociative Identity Disorder—served on its advisory board, and one Leadership Council researcher told a reporter that Levine’s book was a sign that a movement to promote adult-child sex was “gathering steam.”58 What drew these people to both debates was the fact that in each case the argument had less to do with any children in actual need of protection than with the adults who imagined themselves to be doing the protecting. A close look at the substance of their arguments suggests that the alleged need to protect functioned as a euphemistic substitute for the desire to control. “If Americans understood the radical roots of the sex education courses in their schools,” Robert Knight said at a press conference on Levine’s book, “they would be reaching for abstinence-based curricula as a literal life preserver even faster than they are now.”59 For many conservative activists, objections to comprehensive sex education have often been grounded in the notion that such programs usurp parents’ natural authority to determine whether their children are allowed to learn about sex.
Today, however, the law can easily be turned against parents—specifically mothers—who choose not to wield every bit of their authority. The 1980s drastically altered people’s views on the wisdom of ever allowing children to go unsupervised, whether walking to school on their own or hanging out on a playground a few blocks away from home. The country’s op-ed pages regularly feature pieces in which middle-aged pundits bemoan the rise of “helicopter parenting,” lament the endless succession of organized activities to which children are subjected in the name of college preparation, and eulogize the carefree childhood afternoons they spent running around in the woods. But the helicopter parenting debate is a debate about upper-middle-class people who choose to involve themselves in every moment of their children’s lives despite having the resources to do otherwise. The consequences of these choices are described primarily as a matter of a family’s psychological health.
But for parents with fewer resources, parents working multiple jobs, and single parents, the consequences of allowing children to roam free, even for a moment, can be much more tangible and destructive. In March 2014 a woman living in Scottsdale, Arizona, was arrested after leaving her young children alone in a car while she went to interview for a job with Farmers Insurance. She had arranged for a babysitter to watch the kids, but the babysitter never showed up, and she needed the job very badly. It was 71 degrees outside, and the children spent sixty-nine minutes alone in the car. Shanesha Taylor lost custody of her children, spent ten days in jail, and was charged with two counts of felony child abuse.60 Later that year an African American woman from South Carolina left her nine-year-old daughter at a park while she went to her job at a McDonalds one and a half miles away. She was arrested and charged with unlawful conduct toward a child. “This day and time, you never know who’s around,” said one woman interviewed about the incident. “Good, bad, it’s just not safe.”61 Around the same time, the police officer who arrested Nicole Gainey in Port St. Lucie, Florida, for allowing her seven-year-old son to play alone in a public park wrote in his report that “numerous sex offenders reside in the vicinity.” “He just basically kept going over that there’s pedophiles and this and that,” Gainey said, “and basically the park wasn’t safe and he shouldn’t be there alone.”62
Here, then, are cases in which the fear that violent pedophiles might abduct children from public places—a vanishingly rare occurrence—was used to justify the punishment of women who were looking for work, women who were at work, or women who simply thought that she and her child might both benefit from the child being allowed some time to play on his own—in other words, women whose failure to devote every moment to their role as mothers was viewed as literally criminal. There is a direct link between child abuse hysteria and antifeminism, and the fact that such punitive measures, when criticized, are invariably described as “well intentioned” only makes them more effective and harder to roll back. Although all of these cases were widely criticized in the media, most people support the general principles that justified them: 68 percent of Americans believe that parents should be legally prohibited from allowing children under the age of ten to play in public parks without adult supervision, and 43 per
cent think that prohibition should extend to children up to the age of twelve.63 Of course, making affordable day care available to all parents would help working mothers to avoid situations in which they felt compelled to leave their children alone even when they did not want to, but the ritual abuse panic made sure that day care came under suspicion as well.
Who wields authority within the family? How much authority does the family, as an institution, wield in society? To a large extent these are the questions on which the ritual abuse hysteria was founded, and they run from at least the early 1980s up to the present day. That they provoked not just argument and conflict but specifically hysteria can paradoxically be credited to the fact that they had already been answered when the panic began.
In does not quite go far enough to say that the patriarchal nuclear family changed during the second half of the twentieth century; it became incoherent. For nearly two centuries, ever since the appearance of industrialization, life in the West had been organized around the idea that the best way for people to live was in private, single-family households. As men were expected to support the rest of the family through their work, these households determined much of the shape and structure of economic life. As sex was not to occur outside the confines of a monogamous marriage, and as the purpose of a marriage was to produce children, the family also bolstered prohibitions on homosexuality and determined the course of people’s erotic experience. And as the family became the site of people’s most intimate emotional relationships with others, from the very beginning of life to its end, it shaped psychology (the description of the psychology of family life was Freud’s whole project).
All of this broke down with the sexual revolution and especially with the second wave of the feminist movement. But it didn’t break down all at once in practice. In addition to the family’s persistent psychological power, many areas of government policy are still biased toward the family as a kind of social ideal, with tax law being perhaps the most obvious. Women continue to perform more domestic and care-based work than men. And many people continue to live in single-breadwinner nuclear families, though not a majority of Americans by any means.
Theory is just as important as practice, however, and in theory the 1960s and feminism successfully did away with the idea that there could be no justifiable or desirable alternatives to family life. California became the first state to legalize no-fault divorce in 1969, and since then the social expectation that people get married and that marriage last until one spouse’s death has steadily declined. As divorce rates increased, the fact of having been divorced became less of a social liability for women and even, in some cases, a mark of independence. As lifelong marriage and full-time care of children became less essential to women’s social and economic security, women began to demand increased and fair access to work outside the home. And as the presence of women in offices and other professional environments became less of a curiosity and more of an accepted fact of life, new possibilities for the organization of life back at home proliferated: single parents, second and third marriages, cohabitation, second and third marriages to people with children from previous marriages, same-sex marriages.
Every stage of this diversification of private life has been accompanied by anxious predictions of moral decay, social breakdown, and sexual anarchy. Legislators have responded to and fueled these anxieties by passing laws designed to shore up the nuclear family’s crumbling walls. But the legislation has had no effect—the percentage of Americans who are married continues its steady decline.64 And the repeated expressions of anxiety are more likely to indicate simply that freedoms can be frightening when they are new, not that the new freedoms are bad or that people don’t want them. In light of the obstacles thrown in its path, it is clear that the transformation of family life would not have happened except that people very much wanted it to happen. “Marriage as a social institution (an economic partnership, a secure context for child-rearing) only works when it’s more or less compulsory,” Ellen Willis wrote in the late 1980s.65 By the time she made her observation, many people had decided that what they most wanted from marriage and the nuclear family, in spite of the difficulties involved, was to get out.
This was all well under way by the time Judy Johnson made her initial phone call to the Manhattan Beach police. That something fundamental about the family’s place in society had shifted, that the shift was permanent, and that it was only gaining momentum had all become obvious by the end of the 1970s—at least it had to conservatives, who were by then a few years into their campaign of cultural resistance. The trouble since then has been to acknowledge this shift, to accommodate it, and to help people acclimate to its effects. This difficulty became especially acute in the 1980s, and it is worth considering that the psychoanalytic theory of repression, so maligned by Roland Summit, Jeffrey Masson, and the recovered memory therapists, provides a detailed description of what happens when people are unable to acknowledge what they already know and want. Repression is not so much an act of passive forgetting but of active mental avoidance, and it isn’t so much events or memories that are repressed but rather ideas and desires. We repress that which we do not want to think about. One of Freud’s most important intellectual leaps was the insight that repression occurs because of a particular desire’s “sharp contrast to the subject’s other wishes” and its incompatibility with “the ethical and aesthetic standards of [the subject’s] personality.”66 On a social scale, the idea of the nuclear family’s decline emerged with an alarming speed and force, and for many people it seemed to be alarmingly incompatible with the rest of society’s ethical and aesthetic standards—its culture, its rhetoric, its view of what made for a good life. The family’s decline was repressed almost from the very moment it began.
Freud also understood that repression doesn’t actually make an idea go away. Excluded from consciousness by a mental process that Freud called resistance, the repressed idea finds other ways of making its presence known. It may appear in Freud’s famous slips of the tongue, transforming an innocuous remark into a revealing gaffe, or it might shape the contents of dreams. It can manifest as a personality quirk, a tic, a phobia, a habit of speech, or a minor compulsion. A repressed idea can also inflect a person’s emotional life, furnishing him with strong opinions he cannot explain or making him vulnerable to certain kinds of confrontation. Freud’s case studies and clinical reports are also filled, however, with descriptions of the more outlandish consequences of repression: unexplained bouts of coughing that last for weeks at a time, mysterious illnesses for which a physician can find no somatic explanation, paralysis, temporary blindness, sleep disturbances. These are the mind’s attempts to protect itself from some idea it does not want to confront, to release some of the psychic stress produced by repression. They are symptoms of hysteria.
Recovered memory and the day care and ritual abuse hysteria drove the social repression of two ideas. First, the nuclear family was dying. Second, people mostly did not want to save it.
Kee MacFarlane’s interviews told the well-off, professional parents of Manhattan Beach that the potential freedoms afforded by day care could not justify depriving children of constant access to their mothers’ love and attention. In Kern County, Jordan, and Wenatchee, prosecutors arrested and charged primarily poor and lower-middle-class defendants, people among whom mixed families were more common than among the upper-middle class. The moral of these three cases was that mixed families led to predatory sex rings. The trials in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and San Antonio, Texas, which resulted in the conviction of gay and lesbian defendants, dramatized the long-held idea that homosexuality as such constituted a threat to normal family life. Multiple personality disorder said that women would inevitably be traumatized by the new roles that had become available to them, that in fact the availability of multiple roles itself was a form of mass mental illness.
Hysteria is a loaded term, one cocooned in sedimentary layers of psychologica
l history, discredited theories, failed treatments, misunderstandings, and misdiagnoses. Many feminists also consider it to be a politically suspicious term for the simple reason that hysteria has long been thought of as a specifically feminine malady. To describe a man or his behavior as “hysterical” is in part to make him seem more like a woman, and to describe a woman in the same way is to dredge up a host of stereotypes about the female sex and its supposedly inherent weaknesses: its irrationality, its capriciousness, its emotionalism. Given the word’s history and its long-running associations with these sexist ideas and therapeutic practices, and given the sexist fears that motivated the day care cases and the recovered memory movement, it can be tempting to discard “hysteria” altogether in favor of “panic” or some other more neutral term.
The problem is that no other word accounts for the way these cases simultaneously horrified and fascinated those who were involved in them, the way parents’ feelings of repulsion flourished alongside an excitement born of the idea that conspiracies were unfolding in ostensibly idyllic communities. Some ritual abuse skeptics have explained the panic as a simple failure of reason, a sudden and violent collapse of the country’s ability to distinguish fact from fiction. Those failures were real, and it is important, from a forensic and judicial perspective, to identify and remedy them. However, it hardly explains anything at all to point out that people got their facts wrong. The more pressing question has to do with the source and cause of this eagerness to mistake a decade-long waking nightmare for the truth. Of course, the hysteria played on people’s fears about the social changes that began to work their way through American society at the end of the twentieth century: the reorganization of private life and the slow but still probably—hopefully—inexorable breakdown of the country’s sexual hierarchy. But people also actively wanted these social changes to take place, even if they often found this was a desire they could not bring themselves to acknowledge, whether in public or in the privacy of their own homes or heads. The hysteria drew its special character in the 1980s and 1990s from the difficulty people had recognizing this desire and acknowledging that many areas of life were already being transformed to accommodate it. This difficulty persists today, and as a result, so do the hysteria’s effects. But the middle-class nuclear family will not be restored to its former place, nor do most people want it to be. To imagine otherwise can only perpetuate this series of costly and destructive fantasies.