bring a son before the authorities on sex charges, it was usually for molesting younger sisters or stepsisters or, in a few cases, for suspected homosexuality. Odem, Delinquent Daughters, 178. Historian Ruth Alexander found similarly unsatisfactory outcomes for families in the cases she tracked from New York State in the 1930s and 1940s. When accusing parents found out that the mandatory sentence for sexual misconduct was three years, most were shocked. So while their girls were locked away in Bedford Hills, several hours' trip north of New York City, mothers inundated the wardens with letters pleading for reduced sentences and more humane treatment of their daughters. Interview with Alexander, July 1998.

28. Steven Schlossman and Stephanie Wallach, 'The Crime of Precocious Sexuality: Female Juvenile Delinquency in the Progressive Era,' Harvard Educational Review 48 (1978): 65-95.

29. Luker, Dubious Conceptions, 30, 212.

30. Interviews with Ricki Solinger and Ruth Alexander, July 1998.

31. Odem, Delinquent Daughters, 188.

32. The 1995 National Survey of Family Growth found that 43.1 percent of girls lost their virginity with a partner one to two years older, 26.8 percent with someone three to four years older, and 11.8 percent with a person five or more years older. The average teen girl's male lover is three years older than she. Moore, Driscoll, and Lindberg, 'A Statistical Portrait of Adolescent Sex,' 13. See also: Sharon Thompson, Going All the Way (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 217, 322.

33. Security classifications are in many cases similar to mandatory sentencing laws, which designate certain categories of crime (sex offenses and drug offenses among them) as more 'dangerous,' even if they are not more violent, than other crimes.

34. Divorce filings in author's possession. Not identified here to protect privacy.

35. National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect, Federal Register, part 2 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, January 23, 1978), 3244.

36. Frank Bruni, 'In an Age of Consent, Defining Abuse by Adults,' New York Times, November 9, 1997, 'Week in Review,' 3.

37. Allie C. Kilpatrick, Long-Range Effects of Child and Adolescent Sexual Experiences: Myths, Mores, Menaces (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1992).

38. Kilpatrick, Long-Range Effects of Child and Adolescent Sexual Experiences, 58, 90.

39. Letter, NAMBLA Bulletin, June 1994.

40. William E. Prendergast, Sexual Abuse of Children and Adolescents (New York: Continuum Publishing Co., 1996), 26.

41. Bruce Rind and Philip Tromovitch, 'A Meta-analytic review of findings from national samples on Psychological Correlates of Child Sexual Abuse,' Journal of Sex Research (1997): 237-55.

42. Author interview with Lynn Phillips, January 1998.

43. Thompson, Going All the Way, 215-44.

44. I also asked the prominent sexologist and therapist Leonore Tiefer about these relationships. She said: 'You have to take into account the subjectivity and the realm of experience of each individual young person. You can't explain this stuff with universals—with sociobiology or sociology. The power issues are not wiped out' by individual explanations, however; 'they are complicated.' Tiefer gave the example of Monica Lewinsky. 'On one hand, you could say she's powerful: she got the leader of the free world to desire her. On the other, there is a certain powerlessness and displacement of ambition' onto the sexual conquest.

45. Phillips, 'Recasting Consent,' 87.

46. Martin J. Costello, Hating the Sin, Loving the Sinner: The Minneapolis Children's Theatre Company Adolescent Sexual Abuse Prosecutions (New York: Garland, 1991), 8-13.

47. Elstein and Davis, 'Sexual Relations between Adult Men and Young Teen Girls,' 19.

48. Most states allow youngsters to drive, and even to marry, before they may have unmarried sexual intercourse. In Massachusetts at this writing, a person can marry at twelve, but if someone who is not her husband inserts his finger into her vagina when she is fifteen, even with her express consent, he can be charged with statutory rape. Under a section of the state's legal code entitled 'Crimes against Chastity, etc.,' taking a picture of her naked seventeen-year-old buttocks will earn the photographer up to twenty years in prison. Massachusetts Family Law, Section 354 (1990); Massachusetts Criminal Law, Section 12: 16 (1992); Massachusetts General Laws, Section 373: 29A.

49. In 1993 in New Mexico it was thirteen; by 1998, it was seventeen; in Maine it went from fourteen to eighteen in the same years. 'The Geography of Desire,' Details (June 1993). See also Elstein and Davis, 'Sexual Relations between Adult Males and Young Teen Girls.' For a continual update of age of consent throughout the world, consult www.ageofconsent.com.

50. Males, Scapegoat Generation, 71. 51. David T. Evans, Sexual Citizenship: The Material Construction of Sexualities (London: Routledge, 1993), 215.

5. No-Sex Education

1. Joyce Purnick, 'Where Chastity Is Not Virtuous,' New York Times, May 25, 1981, A14.

2. My suspicion is the word abstinence migrated into sex ed from the hugely popular movement of twelve-step anti-'addiction' programs based on the model of Alcoholics Anonymous, which preached that only complete renunciation and daily recommitment could bring a bad habit under control.

3. Guidelines for Comprehensive Sexuality Education (New York: Sex Information and Education Council of the U.S., 1994), 1.

4. Social Security Act, Title V, Section 510 (1997), Maternal and Child Health Bureau, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

5. David J. Landry, Lisa Kaeser, and Cory L. Richards, 'Abstinence Promotion and the Provision of Information about Contraception in Public School District Sexuality Education Policies,' Family Planning Perspectives 31, no. 6 (November/December 1999): 280-86; Kaiser Family Foundation, 'Most Secondary Schools Take a More Comprehensive Approach to Sex Education,' press release, December 14, 1999.

6. 'Changes in Sexuality Education from 1988-1999,' SEICUS, SHOP Talk Bulletin 5, no. 16 (October 13, 2000).

7. Diana Jean Schemo, 'Survey Finds Parents Favor More Detailed Sex Education,' New York Times, October 4, 2000, A1.

8. Joyce Purnick, 'Welfare Bill: Legislating Morality?' New York Times, August 19, 1996, 'Metro Matters,' B1.

9. Patricia Campbell, Sex Education Books for Young Adults 1892-1979 (New York: R. R. Bowker Co., 1979), viii.

10. F. Valentine, 'Education in Sexual Subjects,' New York Medical Journal 83 (1906): 276-78.

11. Benjamin C. Gruenberg, High Schools and Sex Education: A Manual of Suggestions of Education Related to Sex (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Public Health Service and U.S. Bureau of Education, 1922), 95.

12. Evelyn Duvall, Facts of Life and Love for Teenagers, as quoted in Campbell, Sex Education Books for Young Adults, 87.

13. Mary S. Calderone, 'A Distinguished Doctor Talks to Vassar College Freshmen about Love and Sex,' Redbook, February 1964 (reprint).

14. Sex Education: Conditioning for Immorality, filmstrip, John Birch Society, released around 1969 (n.d.).

15. Handman and Brennan, Sex Handbook, 170.

16. Sol Gordon, You: The Psychology of Surviving and Enhancing Your Social Life, Love Life, Sex Life, School Life, Home Life, Work Life, Emotional Life, Creative Life, Spiritual Life, Style of Life Life (New York: Times Books, 1975).