Foley Is a Sexual Harasser, Not a Child Molester

From AlterNet, an exercise in common sense from Judith Levine:

No, Foley is something far less press-worthy: He is a sexual harasser -- a person who uses his position of power in a workplace or other institution to extract sexual favors from a subordinate.

Why don't we call him that?

One reason, no doubt, is that Nancy Pelosi and the other Democratic women know sexual harassment is not taken seriously in Washington. They remember Anita Hill. If a Supreme Court nominee could get away with it, who'd care about a piss-ant Florida rep?

More important, though, calling Foley's misconduct sexual harassment would be saying something about the young people on whom he hit.

The object of sexual harassment is assumed to be an adult.

And

This Congress has just passed the billion-dollar mark in appropriations for abstinence-only education. Its message: that minors are not -- and should not be -- sexual. While more than one congressional member has surely piqued to the sexual-object possibilities of the nubile messengers in their midst, they are ideologically unable to view these youngsters as sexual subjects -- least of all, as willing gay sexual subjects.

If they -- or we -- can't recognize teenagers' right to say yes, we have little choice but to "protect" them by saying no on their behalf, whether they want us to or not.

Click here for the rest.

This fits in very nicely with what I was trying to say a few weeks ago about the Foley affair. But then, that's no surprise. Levine's controversial book Harmful to Minors published a few years back was extraordinarily influential to me. Hers is one of the very few voices in public discourse that is able to navigate the treacherous waters, filled with hysteria, homophobia, media exploitation, political opportunism, and religious puritanism, of sexual dialogue in this country. That is, honest and reasonable public conversations about sex are exceedingly rare in this country. The Foley thing is a prime example: both sides of the debate were reeking of dishonesty, and the Democrats who opportunistically screamed "child molestation," when there was, and continues to be, absolutely no evidence of that at all, particularly pissed me off.

Clearly, the Foley affair, when all is said and done, is more about the intersection of American gay anxiety with American underage sex anxiety than anything else. People just go fucking crazy about these two subjects, and combining them appeared to create a sort of mass insanity. Perfectly reasonable people were saying some of the most stupid shit about it, condemning perfectly reasonable points of view while they drooled out their own fear induced weirdness.

I wonder what the next bizarre sex freak out's going to be.

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