Entry 1:

Dear Katha,

The other day I ran by a bus shelter whose public-service poster nearly stopped me in my tracks. "Talk to your kids about sex," it said. "Everyone else does." I think the cleverness of this ad would have seized me under any circumstance, playing as it does on the parent's constant subterranean sense of being bombarded from all sides by a popular culture eager to take over the task of child-rearing. But it seemed an especially apt counterpoint to our reading for this week, Marjorie Heins' Not in Front of the Children.

Heins, a former director of the ACLU's Arts Censorship Project, has set out to trace the power and history of the "harm to minors" rationale for censorship. From the Victoria era onward, she argues, American censors (and would-be censors) have known their most powerful weapon is the assertion that children must be protected from whatever it is that censors wish to suppress. For a remarkably long time, this strategy succeeded in the almost total absence of proof--or even much coherent theory--as to the precise nature of the harm from which kids were being sheltered.

In a clear, scholarly narrative, Heins walks us through the central history of First Amendment law, from the age of Comstock through Ulysses and Lady Chatterly, from George Carlin's seven forbidden words through today's continuing struggles over censorship and filtering of the Internet. While the courts have increasingly overturned legislation that curtails the free-speech rights of children--especially where it can be shown that these restrictions essentially restrict the rights of adults to see the same material--the will to protect some cherished notion of childhood innocence still asserts itself in restrictions on sex education, in the government's promotion of "abstinence-only" sex ed, and in Congress' apparently inexhaustible ambition to find some way of censoring the Internet that will withstand Supreme Court scrutiny. 

There's endless interesting material here. I was especially struck by Heins' exploration of why filtering--commonly thought of, and treated by the courts, as a remedy less drastic than outright censorship--is in some ways more chilling because it is carried out by private companies under unstated standards. When they take Huck Finn out of the library or when the FCC forbids the use of the word "fuck," you know what's missing. But if your local library's search engine is secretly spiriting away every use of the word "sex," you'll never know that your search has left out references to sextons and sextants and Essex. (I guess this is pretty basic, but I'd never really thought through this issue before.)

Yet I came away from Not in Front of the Children feeling that it was not a very good book. For one thing, it's rather dry and lawyerly. (And don't get me started on the author's annoying habit of quoting from material she identifies only--and sometimes confusingly--in footnotes.) But more than anything, I thought Heins was guilty, in mirror image, of the same sin she's indicting censors for: She comes no closer than her foes to really grappling with the question of whether there are any circumstances or materials from which kids ought to be protected--as a matter of social practice if not of law. The book turns out to be a very big dose of legal history sandwiched between some pretty scant bits of social analysis; it pretends to be making an argument that it ends up tackling almost in passing.

Not that Heins isn't asking (or at least pretending to ask) a great question. Is it really bad for children to see all the things that many of us assume they shouldn't see? Never mind Judy Blume, since (let's be honest) Heins is preaching to the choir here--to people who already know it's stupid to think Harry Potter will lure children into witchcraft or to imagine that we can keep little girls from having precocious sex if we don't tell them about their clitorises. Would it be bad for children to watch Deep Throat? What about Internet porn? What about violent Internet porn? Why, and how, and who says so?

Great questions, which I welcomed the chance to think about. But Heins raises them and then ignores them for a good 200 pages. Over and over, she insists that those who would censor material for children are "hostage to largely unexamined moral and psychological assumptions." But she is peddling her own assumption, which is that unless social scientists can produce some quantifiable proof of harm, then any effort to limit what children are exposed to is an obviously bankrupt endeavor. An author who hopes to overcome a pervasive, deeply entrenched social myth is not well advised to begin by simply dismissing it.

Let me make clear that I'm not challenging her First Amendment analysis. The burden of proof absolutely belongs to those who would censor, and Heins is quite accurate in saying that those who claim to be acting for children's protection have never persuasively met that burden. If she were willing to rest her case there, I would absolutely agree with her: As her history of censorship law conclusively demonstrates, all efforts to censor eventually run aground on the impossibility of drawing distinctions clear enough to meet the burden of the Constitution. The blessings of the First Amendment can't be enjoyed piecemeal, and amen to that.

But Heins feints in the direction of an even larger argument, which is that the very impulse to "protect" children is a bogus one, a function of neurotic adult anxiety over the impossibility of controlling children's development. And this case she never really bothers to make. In part this is a structural problem. It isn't until the book's penultimate chapter that she really addresses head-on the social science on which censors lean. Here she persuades pretty effectively that studies of the possible connections between violent imagery and actual behavior haven't produced much in the way of solid evidence.

But that still leaves unanswered the question she pretends to ask: How should we think about what is good for children to see? To assert that people--including small people--digest culture in unpredictable, nonlinear ways still doesn't begin to address whether there are things it's better for them not to see. Heins could have settled for arguing that these are not questions for our government to try to answer. But she comes perilously close to saying that they're not questions anyone can rationally ask. Her complete lack of sympathy for the parental quandary--indeed, her dismissal of it--seems like overreaching.

As a parent of young children, I couldn't help feeling, as I read it, that Heins' book is sort of beside the point. She never really acknowledges this in so many words, but the fact is that her side has been decisively winning the legal battle her book is chiefly occupied with chronicling. The ACLU may despair of certain Midwestern school boards, but they've definitely brought the Supreme Court around. Even the current conservative court was so unwilling to see adult First Amendment rights curtailed by efforts to shield children that it ruled in favor of the Playboy channel in the 1998 case concerning the "signal bleed" that sometimes allows nonsubscribers to the channel to see or hear it. (Concerned parents, they ruled, could invest in "lockbox" technology that would let them eliminate the signal entirely.) Earlier, the justices drop-kicked the Internet component of the Communications Decency Act (passed in 1996), in which Congress passed wildly unworkable restrictions on what minors could be allowed to see.

Forgive me my complacency, but I've been sort of busy lately wondering how the marketplace has somehow insinuated Britney Spears into the notice of my 5-year-old. For most of us, the real confusion is, of course, in our homes. It's one thing for Heins to write that parents' concerns about the effects of media violence "are not borne out by the much-overstated, often frankly ambiguous results of empirical studies." It's quite another thing--and a huge leap of logic--to continue, "Worries about media violence are thus, like worries about sex and vulgarity, largely symbolic."

To most of us, these worries are anything but symbolic. They are concrete and constant, the very essence of figuring out how to raise secure children in a culture that honors them only as consumers. Most of the parents I know aren't looking for Big Brother to reduce the cacophony of sex and violence that surrounds their kids in the popular culture. But they are constantly concerned about it. (Talk to your children about sex. Everyone else does.)

And when you come right down to it, Heins seems to belong to the "Ahhh, get over it" school of child-rearing. "In the face of the many truly frightening realities of life, one cannot help raising a bemused eyebrow at reports such as one emanating from the Harvard School of Public Health in 2000 that urged the MPAA to modify its rating system to indicate that Bambi, Alladin, and The Lion King had too much violence for young kids." Again, it's one thing to say that the nature of any distress these movies might cause is too ephemeral to justify being enthroned in a ratings system. But it is a parent's job (and privilege) to wonder whether her 2-year-old is apt to be upset by Disney's endless procession of dying parents, and I think it's telling that Heins has such contempt for this undertaking.

Can't wait to hear your thoughts.

Best,
Marjorie