To the Editors:
Readers of The New York Review might be bemused by the venom of Garry Wills’s attack on me in the June 13 issue [“Priests and Boys”]. It would take a lot of space to rebut each specific allegation or piece of misinformation, but I want to focus on the monstrous and wholly false charge that I am a “praiser…of boy-love.” Since 1978, I estimate that I have published a total of well over three million words, counting books, scholarly articles, reviews, and journalism. I have written to Dr. Wills to invite him to cite one single statement from that substantial paper trail, any one sentence or passage, that justifies the claim that I have ever advocated, defended, praised, or promoted this type of conduct. Of course, I have received no reply, nor have I received an apology.
As far as I can tell, Wills bases his scurrilous charge on the following arguments. Firstly, “For [Jenkins], real pedophilia (child-love) concerns only pre-pubescents.” Indeed it does, since I use the definition accepted by the entire US psychiatric profession. Secondly, “[Jenkins] disapproves of this, but says that restraining it may threaten quite different sex acts with post-pubescents, which he calls ephebophilia (boy-love). He holds that statutory rape laws should not outlaw such youth-love.” I have never made such a statement, nor does it reflect anything like my actual views. If I have written or said anything to this effect, I invite him to supply chapter and verse. Where? When? By the by, ephebophilia does not mean boy-love, the term is not something I invented, and obviously I never claimed that problems like rape were nonexistent, etc., but confronting every one of his misrepresentations would require a book-length reply. And I have indeed written histori-cal accounts of how the age of consent has changed through American history: Does Dr. Wills dispute the accuracy of my statements?
In seeking the origins of his inchoate fury, we need to understand Dr. Wills’s current crusade against the Roman Catholic Church, which he dislikes because it has fallen so badly out of step with him on significant issues of belief and practice. In Dr. Wills’s view, exhibit A for systematic Catholic depravity has been the sexual abuse scandals within the American Church, which (in my view) he interprets according to the sensationalist stereotypes prevailing in the contemporary media. I have the misfortune to be the academic who has been most visibly engaged in challenging those stereotypes and bogus statistics. I have therefore committed the unpardonable sin of attempting to sideline a successful witch hunt by the application of critical scholarship. The response to my efforts can be seen in Dr. Wills’s bizarre jeremiad.
Since Dr. Wills and I share an admiration for the work of G.K. Chesterton, I hope he will appreciate a Chestertonian conclusion here: Oh, chuck it, Wills.
Philip Jenkins
Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies
Pennsylvania State University
University Park, Pennsylvania
Garry Wills replies:
A few points:
My puzzle concerned the bishops, not Jenkins: “How did this praiser of pornography and boy-love become a hero to reactionary Catholics?” Bishops rarely consort publicly with libertarians who are sexually permissive on principle. I do apologize for using only one verb with two objects. I should have said “a praiser of pornography and defender of boy-love.”
That Jenkins is permissive on most things he tells us at the beginning of Beyond Tolerance, where he belatedly opposes one form of sexual expression—pornography involving prepubescents: “This is a curious position for someone who defines himself as a libertarian” (p. 9). He retracts what he had earlier held, that concern over this form of pornography was “largely bogus” (p. 8).
Jenkins, who came late and reluctantly to concern over prepubescent sex, has a vastly different attitude toward postpubescent sex. There he sees a “continuum” (p. 27) of social attitude, with the age of consent ranging from age ten (acceptable in some societies) and on up. The age of consent set by law is socially arbitrary, since “sexual behavior with teenagers has been considered normal in most societies” (p. 27). Again, I was not contesting this view, just wondering why Catholic conservatives, of all people, suddenly found it attractive.
Within Jenkins’s framework, sex with teenagers is normal, though illegal in some societies, but hardly “monstrous.” For him to say I had leveled at him a “monstrous charge,” I would have had to be accusing him of condoning child-sex. I did not do that. I spelled out what I meant by boy-sex (pedophilia)—the same thing that the inventers of the term meant by it and that society at large has always meant by it (despite the few psychiatrists who change its meaning to apply to child-sex).
Accepting that sex with teenagers is normal destroys the rationale for statutory rape laws (I did not mention rape in general, as Jenkins claims). From this position it would be easy but not inevitable to become a defender of pedophiles. The evidence that Jenkins takes that natural step is the way he has defended pedophiles in practice. He does this by vilifying every critic of the pedophiles, calling their concern with victims mere excuses to promote their agenda as anti-Catholics, feminists, lawyers, therapists, or journalists.
Since these are witch hunts, the priest-predators they target have no more reality than witches, and in all his millions of treasured words Jenkins expresses no genuine concern for their victims.
His treatment of me illustrates his method. There was nothing ad hominem in my review. I know nothing personally of Jenkins, and was not even interested in him except for bishops’ odd reaction to him. I discussed his books. He discusses my motivation, which he claims to know: I just hate the Church. I suppose that protecting pedophiles would prove I love the Church—a position some bishops have taken. That must be why they find him so useful.
To the Editors:
Gary Wills [sic] accuses me of reading selectively in researching Harmful to Minors [Priests and Boys,” NYR, June 13]. But his reading—and his representation—of the book is selective at best. Discussing my chapter on a relationship between a 13-year-old and a 21-year-old, he quotes me saying the defendant had a “hefty sheet of charges pending against him.” But he leaves out the succeeding sentence: “What [the press] neglected to say was that all those charges were related to his consensual relationship with one person,” his underage girlfriend.
Wills implies that I believe the girl’s parents “had no responsibility for trying to save their daughter from the consequences of an irresponsible choice.” In fact, the chapter demonstrates that statutory rape law, which the parents turned to, rarely achieves this aim. It is a blunt instrument for adjudicating what are almost always family disputes over teenagers’ (usually daughters’) sexual choices. By categorizing minors as unable to consent to sex, the law undermines education in real decision-making. By forcing a minor to testify as the victim of a chosen lover, prosecutors often do more psychological harm than good.
And increasingly, the law is applied hysterically. “It’s perfectly understandable for parents to go crazy if their 13-year-old daughter is dating a 21-year-old guy,” says one psychologist I quote. “But the legal system is supposed to sort things out rationally and justly.” A 12-to-24-year sentence for a consensual relationship—what this young man is serving—is neither rational nor just.
Wills says I listen selectively, too, believing a girl who says she consents but not one who says she regrets sex. But I take neither as unproblematic truth. In considering the priests and their underage sexual objects, neither should he. Sexuality is always shaped by history. Our definitions of “victimization” reflect little about minors’ ability to consent and little even about the harm sex with an adult might bring to a minor, and everything about current religious and psychological politics.
Then again, if he had read less selectively, he might have gotten the author’s name right. It’s Levine, not Levin.
Judith Levine
Brooklyn, New York
Garry Wills replies:
In her sentimentalization of the twenty-one-year-old “Romeo” with a history of alleged abuse of other women, abandoned children, mental trouble, inability to hold a job, and, yes, hefty criminal charges (on the record, no matter how reported), Levine does not think there was anything the thirteen-year-old had to be saved from. In her letter she mentions the ineffectuality or draconian application of statutory rape laws. In the book, she deplores their existence. That was my only point.
I would lament my misspelling of her last name had she not misspelled my first one.
To the Editors:
Garry Wills explains etymologically why there is no difference between pedophilia—sexual desire for children—and ephebophilia—desire for adolescents [“Priests and Boys,” NYR, June 13]. His argument collapses nine pages and two articles later in the fourteen-year-old face of Lorna Sage. Sage, as pictured in James Fenton’s article “The Woman Who Did,” was beautiful (“dangerously beautiful,” says Fenton), sexually attractive, and physically mature. An adult male who was interested only in fourteen-year-olds might be considered an ephebophile. But an adult male who included the likes of Ms. Sage in his catalog of preferences could only be described as normal.
Why does it matter? As Wills points out, adult sex with either a child or an adolescent can have terrible consequences for the victim. But sex with an adolescent is merely a crime. Pedophilia is a disorder, and can be grounds for lifetime civil commitment under the nation’s “Sexually Violent Predator” laws.
The Supreme Court upheld “predator” laws in Kansas v. Hendricks, provided that they “adequately distinguish” disordered individuals such as Mr. Hendricks “from other dangerous persons who are perhaps more properly dealt with exclusively through criminal proceedings.” Prisons are full of people who gave in to temptation, whether to commit murder or insider trading. They are merely criminals. So is the priest or alleged predator who gives in to the temptation of sex with a fourteen-year-old like Lorna Sage.
People sexually abuse children for many reasons: accessibility, vulnerability, fear of adult relationships, even “dangerous beauty.” Hendricks, on the other hand, is a true pedophile, sexually attracted to children as young as seven (and, unlike some pedophiles, is unable to control his urges). If we are to maintain any distinction between mental disorder and mere criminality, then therapists, courts, and commentators must reserve the word “pedophile” for people like Hendricks, and avoid using it to describe everyone who has sex with someone under legal age.
Wills is right, then, to suggest that “ephebophilia” (or its synonym, “hebephilia)” is not a very useful term—but for the wrong reason. It is not, as he maintains, that ephebophiles should be lumped with pedophiles. The problem is that they’re too hard to tell from everybody else.
But Wills’s misuse of etymology pales next to his misuse of statistics. “The most recent thorough review of findings on pedophile cases in general suggests that about 5 percent of accusations have proved false,” he claims. He has things backwards. In this country, we try not to condemn people unless accusations are proved true. In the 1980s, victim advocates promoted the theory that alleged sex-abuse victims must always be believed. The theory was a corrective to the Freudian idea that most incest allegations were a product of female hysteria. It may have been necessary for treatment purposes, but it corrupted basic constitutional principles. Most advocates eventually abandoned it, but not before dozens of lives were ruined in sex-abuse witch hunts in places such as Jordan, Minnesota, and Wenatchee, Washington.
