668 pages. ISBN 0 415 90519 2.
"For over a century, no tactic for stirring up erotic hysteria has been as reliable as the appeal to protect children. The current wave of erotic terror has reached deepest into those areas bordered in some way, if only symbolically, by the sexuality of the young...
"The experiences of art photoprapher Jacqueline Livingston exemplify the climate created by the child porn panic. An assistant professor of photography at Cornell University, Livingston was fired in 1978 after exhibiting pictures of male nudes which included photographs of her seven year old son masturbating... At one point, Kodak confiscated some of her film, and for several months, Livingston lived with the threat of prosecution under the child pornography laws. The Department of Social Services investigated her fitness as a parent. Livingston's posters have been collected by the Museum of Modern Art and other museums. But she has paid a high cost in harassment and anxiety for her efforts to capture on film the uncensored male body at different ages.
"It is easy to see someone like Livingston as a victim of the child porn wars. It is harder for most people to sympathise with actual boy-lovers. Like communists and homosexuals of the 1950s, boy-lovers are so stigmatised that it is difficult to find defenders for their civil liberties, let alone for their erotic orientation. Consequently, the police have feasted upon them. Local police, the FBI, and watchdog postal inspectors have joined to build a huge apparatus whose sole aim is to wipe out the community of men who love underaged youth. In twenty years or so, when some of the smoke has cleared, it will be much easier to show that these men have been the victims of a savage and undeserved witch hunt. A lot of people will be embarrassed by their collaboration with this persecution, but it will be too late to do much good for those men who have spent their lives in prison." [p.7]
Rubin believes that the reason boy-lovers are so excessively persecuted is that Western society has constructed a rigid hierarchy of acceptable sexual behaviour, with married heterosexuals on top and cross-generational sex at the bottom (which makes me wonder where all you married guys fit in :-)
"Popular culture is permeated with ideas that erotic variety is dangerous, unhealthy, depraved, and a menace to everything from small children to national security. Popular sexual ideology is a noxious stew made up of ideas of sexual sin, concepts of pychological inferiority, mob hysteria, accusations of witchcraft, and xenophobia. The mass media nourish these attitudes with relentless propoganda. I would call this system of erotic stigma the _last_ socially acceptable form of prejudice..." [p.12]
Rubin then goes on to argue that as the structures of racism, sexism, and so on were gradually eroded, so the heirarchy of sexual stigmas will eventually be eroded. Rubin's heirarchy is as follows:
(The Gayle Rubin article is an excellent expose of sexual stigmas. I thoroughly recommend that you all read it. You can find it either in "Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality" ed. Carole S Vance, or in "The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader" eds. Abelove, Barale and Halperin.)