Not in Front of the Children

Dear Marjorie,

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The main idea I took away from Not in Front of the Children was this: The United States government has had almost 160 years to figure out how to "balance" protection of children with other concerns--the free speech rights of adults, the free speech rights of those same children, the impossibility of attaining unanimity about what children need to be protected from, and at what ages, and on and on. Over the years, the nature of the supposed threat has changed a bit--from works of literary genius (who worries today that their teen might come across Molly Bloom's soliloquy in a darkened alley?) to Internet porn showing up in their AOL mail box. And (a point Heins could have made more of) the nature of the supposed harm sexual material does has changed a bit, too, from encouraging masturbation in both sexes--a major, and to modern minds comical, obsession of 19th-century moralists--to encouraging sexual violence and machismo in boys and sexual self-objectification in girls. Still, 160 years is a long time, and if the government hasn't been able to get it right in all that time, it seems likely it can't be done: These competing interests cannot be reconciled. Similarly, if the rationale keeps shifting, but the end goal--censorship--remains the same, we have good reason to be suspicious. The history of censorship in America--the prosecution of a long list of wonderful books, useful researchers, daring publishers, and makers of political statements, as well as silly adolescents and limits-testing wise guys--makes it extremely hard to believe that anything would be different this time around. And in fact, as you note, filtering programs, the latest panacea, are a joke--but a joke that, according to the New York Times, prevents New York City school kids from accessing information about breast cancer, abortion, and other sex-related but hardly pornographic subjects. Censorship always involves the substitution of the censor's judgment for one's own--he (or more rarely she) is always censoring on behalf of those who are presumed not to know what's good for them. Smut used to be censored on behalf of women; now it's kids--but as with women, the people making the decision tend to be very interested in keeping from young people useful information, about, for example, homosexuality, birth control, abortion, and sexual pleasure. .

It's true, as you note, that Not in Front of the Children is a rather lawyerly book--Heins treats the subject of protecting children from "indecency" largely as a march of lawsuits. This enables the reader to experience, as it were, first-hand how clueless the Supreme Court has been at various crucial moments--for example, Justice Brennan, a flaming liberal by today's standards, would later describe as "the worst mistake he ever made" his majority decision in Ginzberg v. United States (l966), which held Ralph Ginzberg liable under the Comstock Act for "pandering" because of the comic and flamboyant way he marketed his publications. The court did not see the humor of Ginzberg's attempts to win mailing privileges from Intercourse and Blue Ball, Pa., (he had to settle for Middlesex, N.J.)--even though the publications themselves were not obscene. (My parents subscribed to Eros, one of Ginzberg's artier offerings, which was, incidentally and if memory serves, driven out of business for showing an interracial couple--so what was too hot for the Supremes was just fine with the Pollitts of Sidney Place, Brooklyn.)

Interesting as the legal analysis is (in its dry way) I longed for more social background, a fuller sense of life. Why, for example, was masturbation so disturbing to 19th-century worthies? At one point, Heins mentions late 19th-century anxieties about fear of immigrants, perceived threats to the power of social elites, and changes in the role of women as lying behind the success of Anthony Comstock, censor extraordinaire, and suggests that "similar social upheavals" lie behind today's rhetoric about youthful morals. I would have liked the legal history to have been more deeply embedded in social history, in the texture of real life. It certainly deserves more than a passing mention that anxiety over children's exposure to "indecency" arose in a society in which millions of children worked in dangerous factories, thousands lived on the streets, and only one in 10 went to high school.

Similarly, that anxiety over "indecency" persists today in a society in which one in five children are poor, the schools are falling apart, millions have no health insurance or books to read or after-school and summer programs, and on and on. We still don't know what the effects of exposure to sexual or violent material are for kids--but we have a pretty good idea of the effects of having a math teacher who doesn't know math, or having the emergency room be your pediatrician. So for me an important question is why do worries about kids' exposure to smut and vilent entertainment top the list? Why are we more worried that a kid might read the wrong book than that he or she might have no books in the house at all?

You seem to think that Heins' book is mostly preaching to the choir: Its audience is not likely to think Judy Blume's novels should be tossed from the library or see Harry Potter as a messenger from SATAN. True enough, although its audience might draw the line somewhere else--at rude or raunchy T-shirts in the classroom, high-school graduation speeches full of macho sexual innuendo, serial-killer trading cards (probably worth a fortune today, and how I wish I had the Friendly Dictators set put out by the same company!), all of which have been the subject of legal wrangling. Still, it's worth noting that even though the current Supreme Court has been friendly to the First Amendment, censorship goes on: Margaret Boring lost her high-school teaching job in North Carolina when she chose for her advanced acting class a play that featured themes of divorce, homosexuality, and unwed pregnancy--things that never, EVER happen in North Carolina. Judy Blume may have sold millions of copies, but she is also one of the most frequently banned writers in America. And the censoring of accurate sexual information has taken a giant step in schools, with fully one-third of the nation's sex-ed courses now barring information about birth control and abortion and preaching the ridiculous dictum that sex outside of marriage invariably leads to misery. With all due respect, I think you are underestimating the effect of the Christian fundamentalists and family-values fanatics--we hear about them when they try something really nutty, like banning Halloween. But what about when a Pennsylvania school district decides to forbid teachers from discussing abortion with pregnant students? That is a kind of censorship also--and that kind, the attempt to prevent young people from receiving full and accurate information about sexual issues, is all around us. Much of the time, the censoring impulse doesn't need to rise to lawsuit level: For every Margaret Boring, there are dozens of teachers who see what happened to her and decide to assign Arsenic and Old Lace. (And let's not forget--you still can't say the seven dirty words on the radio!) I sympathize with your hatred of Britney Spears and your distaste for much of the commercial culture in which our kids are swimming. (My daughter is 13--hates Britney, wants me to take her to Freddy Got Fingered.) I, too, felt Heins was a bit breezy about pop culture. But again with all respect, say she'd written a couple of pages deploring dreck and empathizing with Moms and Dads who wish their kids were not so avidly targeted by corporate culture. Then what? Britney is never going to be the object of government censorship or industry self-censorship either. She's what capitalism's all about, along with Barbie and MTV and Eminem and anorexic fashion models and violent video games and logo-laden clothes and all the rest. I'm not even sure that most parents are all that upset about pop youth culture: Two-thirds of American kids have TV sets in their rooms. That doesn't sound to me like the majority of American parents are really interested in monitoring what, and how much, TV their kids are seeing. I've often been to violent movies in theatres with plenty of young children in the audience, accompanied by their parents. (Like 6-year-olds at The Untouchables, where, among much other mayhem, Al Capone bashes in a confederate's head with a baseball bat.) Eminem was awarded a Grammy by grownups, not 14-year-olds. I'm not criticizing your ideas about child-raising; I probably share most of them. I'm just saying that when you get right down to what people actually do, as opposed to what they tell pollsters or a preacher, it may just be that pop culture is, well, popular.

Or am I missing something?

Talk to you tomorrow,

Katha

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This week, Slate's Book Clubbers examine Marjorie Heins' Not in Front of the Children, a history of indecency laws and other forms of censorship aimed at protecting children from offensive material. Click here for a word on our format and here to buy the book.

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