One of the things I noticed in looking at the comments put out by your detractors is how "dirty" they made your book out to be. Do you see that as symptomatic of how any honest talk about sex is trivialized as being simply prurient?

A good example of that is the cover of my book, which shows the bare torso of a child. People have reacted to this book by saying that it is either prurient or pornographic on the one hand, or, on the other, that it is completely innocent. That to me shows that there is no image of a child, or any way of talking about childhood sexuality that doesn't fall into either one camp or the other. The idea that childhood sexuality could be anything but a problem, unless it is altogether expurgated, is something that I frequently come up against.

Another example would be the judges who look at images of a baby in a bathtub and see pornography. My judgment of that guy is that he has a dirty mind!

One of the arguments that we hear quite frequently is that childhood has been "sexualized" by the mass media -- Calvin Klein ads, TV, etc. -- in a different way than it ever was before. Do you think there is any truth to that?

I don't like the word "sexualize" so much. It implies that children wouldn't otherwise be sexual if we didn't subject them to propaganda. We might be comforted by the fact that there has never been a generation that hasn't looked to the media as corrupting its youth. Before there was pornography, there was MTV, and before MTV, there was rock 'n' roll, before rock 'n' roll, there was comic books, before comic books, there was dime novels, before dime novels, there was burlesque. And yet each generation of youth somehow managed to grow up and be morally upstanding enough to decry whatever they felt was happening to the next generation.

As you pointed out in your book, many childhood development experts, such as Dr. Spock, and to some extent, Penelope Leach, were very adamant in labeling sex play as a normal part of childhood. I've noticed lately that people have become more and more fraught over the issue of what constitutes childhood sex play. Some experts even say that sex play itself is a sign that a child has been sexually abused.

There doesn't seem to be any evidence that this generation of children is engaging in any more "sexual rehearsal play" than previous generations. And, as I point out in the book, sexual rehearsal play is so normative throughout the world that anthropologists call it "sexual rehearsal play." They see it as a part of children's sexual development at every age, in every culture, as far back as they've ever studied.

This generation of kids seems to have absorbed a lot of sexual conservatism, even down to their pop heroes, like Britney Spears. Teen pregnancy and teen sex rates both dropped slightly during the '90s, at the same time we're seeing the rise of so-called virginity pledges. Do you think this generation is rebelling by being less sexual than their parents' generation?

The girls who idolize Britney Spears are in the age group the marketers call "tweens." Once they actually become old enough to have sexual desire, I don't think that their idolizing Britney Spears is going to stop them from acting on those desires. In fact, it apparently doesn't even stop Britney.

The drop in teen pregnancy, I would attribute to the use of condoms, and that seems to be what the Alan Guttmacher Institute and everyone else says.

I think that if kids are abstaining, it's mostly out of fear. And it's not simply fear of AIDS and pregnancy. What a lot of kids tell me is that they have this sense, like we did in the early '60s, that any misstep could really mess them up for a long time. It's a sense of huge consequence to anything you might do sexually -- it may do damage to your reputation, or you may have an abortion that you will regret for your entire life. I do think that kids have absorbed, if not so much conservative values, the overall message of conservative teachings, which is fear about sexuality.

Most of the daughters of feminist mothers that I know are not signing abstinence pledges. The people who are signing abstinence pledges are Christian kids. The conservative message is definitely working with young people on the issue of abortion. And I think that pro-choice people have unwittingly aided that by saying that abortion is always a tragedy, that it is really terrible, and difficult to go through.

But it's all just a guess. We really need some data on what kids are doing and feeling and thinking. That would help them, in perhaps educating them better, would help us in perhaps helping to prevent the spread of HIV. But the right has succeeded in shutting down all state funding of such research.

Before the decade in which birth control and abortion on demand were widely available, sex was dangerous; you could irrevocably change your life, or even die from sex, whether from a botched abortion, or an untreated STD, or even in childbirth. And then immediately, within a generation after sexual liberation, in the '80s, with the advent of AIDS, we were returned to a situation in which sex could be lethal.

What would you say to the argument that perhaps the attitudes boomers were raised with, that sex is healthy, that sex can be purely for pleasure, that sex shouldn't be feared, is itself a historical aberration?

I think there is some truth to that, but certain of the changes that happened in the '60s and the '70s through various sexual liberation movements mostly benefited women and gays. What people like Gloria Jacobs, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English said about the sexual revolution was that it was a revolution for women. Men had always done what they wanted to do, and they continued to do what they wanted to do, and I think that is still true for boys.

We're still looking at women and girls. Some of what I consider to be advances of that time -- such as women being recognized as having desire -- have stuck. The right is doing a rear-guard effort to turn that back, but I think it's very hard.

When we look, for instance, at the rate of sexual intercourse for teenage girls, it's now about at the level where it was in 1984, which is right around half -- 54 percent or so. But also history is a little more complicated. For example, in the 1950s, America had the highest rate of teen marriages in the industrialized world.

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