My First Sex Panic
A Personal History of America’s Morality Squad
Do you remember your first sexual propaganda panic?
Long before the "Scary Transsexual in the Ladies Room" fable, there was my golden era: the missing milk carton kids.
A fin de siècle freakout, it was.
I was in my 20s, in San Francisco, at the time of ascendant gay politics, the 1980s. Gay people were winning seats in office, and holding hands in broad daylight.
One morning, my breakfast cereal was no longer accompanied by a back-of-the Cheerios-box advertisement for action-toy figurines.
Instead, the graphic that held my attention was the back of our dairy milk container.
Perfectly framed on the wax carton side was a photograph of a sweet girl’s face, peering wistfully into the camera, with her name listed urgently alongside her age, hair color, and the time she was last seen.
Next week, next breakfast, a new face. It was like the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Every gallon, another missing kid. Mostly girls, or tender boys. Who was stealing the children? All white kids. Sure, Jan.
And why were the victims so impeccably photographed for pathos?
The implication of the Missing Child Carton was that a despicable deviant had made off with these tots, and now their family's only hope was that one of us, one of the decent people at the breakfast table, would spot young Timmy or Sandy and get on the line to 1-800-MIS-SING.
The alarm of the Milk Carton Kids was so dynamic, so successful in its titillation of American fears, that while the campaign was still in its infancy, skeptics began to question its assumptions.
Were these children really missing? Or were they the collateral damage of a child custody fight? Or, perhaps runaways with agendas of their own?
As panics go, the milk carton campaign was investigated rather early, and the resulting revelations yielded depressing, if not exactly evil, results.
Sexual sadists were not kidnapping Shirley Temple look-alikes in record numbers; that was revelation number one.
But children were in turmoil at home in ways that reflected ugly gaps between both genders and generations.
For starters, outlaw child custody battles had become a regular business, in which parents "kidnaped" the kids back and forth from each other like so much jewelry, as much to strike blows against their estranged mates as to protect the child's best interests.
Where did a parent's ego end, and a child's life begin?
Furthermore, teenagers were leaving their families—intact or not—of their own accord, looking for a way out.
"Yes, I've been ‘abducted,’” they sneered, “and I'm never coming home." Many of them were gay, or leaving an oppressive church.
Others realized their families could no longer support them, emotionally or financially. Their parents were the ones who ran away, or were in a state of custodial catatonia.
Grown-ups have been fucking kids and fucking them over, protecting them and letting go of them, treating them like property, loving them badly and loving them inadequately and loving them mindlessly— forever.
This was hardly the first time America had whipped itself into a frenzy over threats to children.
Let’s take a nostalgic look back at three frightening sex crimes against children that roused the entire country's outrage, just after WWII:
"On November 14, ... Linda Joyce Glucoft, aged six years, was sexually assaulted by an elderly relative of the friend she had gone to visit in her Los Angeles neighborhood.
“When she cried out, her assailant, a retired baker who the police had already charged in another child molestation case, choked her with a necktie, stabbed her with an ice pick, and bludgeoned her with an ax, then buried her body in a nearby rubbish heap.
"Only a few days later, a drunken farm laborer assaulted and murdered a seventeen-month-old baby girl outside a dance hall in a small town near Fresno.
“That same week, the Idaho police found the body of seven-year-old Glenda Brisbois, who had last been seen entering a dark blue sedan near her home; she had been murdered by a powerful assailant who had heaved her body fifteen feet into an irrigation canal.
"The gruesome details of these murders and of the hunt for their perpetrators were telegraphed to homes throughout the country by the nation's press.
“According to police statistics, such assaults were proportionately no more common than in previous years, but ... these three murders epitomized to many Americans the heightened dangers that seemed to face women and children...
“Many regarded them not as isolated tragedies but as horrifying confirmation that a plague of "sex crime" threatened their families."
These murders happened in 1949, seventy-six years ago! — and were written up as a history lesson in George Chauncey Jr.'s article, "The Postwar Sex Crime Panic."1
Obviously, given the time frame, there was no fast food, dope, rude music, or gay leader to pin the blame on. No PornTube, or even Playboy magazine. People did not say "fuck" in The New Yorker at the time these kids were murdered.
Nevertheless, these deaths spurred parents and legislators into a first-class puritan hysteria, the first real doozy after WWII. How could these things happen in America? How could we fight enemies abroad and then face this in our neighborhoods?
This wasn't the face of communism or fascism; it was something much more frightening, a group of predators destroying the very littlest, the most innocent. The betrayal by those who seemed banal.
American caricatures of God, country, and righteousness reached their apex after the sex crimes of 1949, when J. Edgar Hoover published an article in The American Magazine called "How Safe is Your Daughter?"
Alongside the F.B.I. director's cautionary tale, a poster with the same headline was produced, featuring three girls of different grade-school ages cringing and fleeing from a giant wart-covered hand hovering in the air over them.
The propaganda urged support for the policing and witch-hunting of a wide range of sexual non-conformists.
The poster’s giant hand also suggested the period's sci-fi horror films, which depicted the threats posed to America by alien ways of life; the implication was that every "sex deviant" was equally alien to traditional American values.
The whole smell of "Is Your Daughter Safe?" was that of evil strangers, motivated by deviant impulses, people who looked like they didn't belong in "our neighborhood," with all the jingoistic and conformist attitudes that description implies.
The group that took the brunt of society's paranoia was gay men, adult homosexuals who were just beginning to develop a real counterculture after the war— but who were in no way out of the closet.
Hoover's maniacal persecution of gay people belied his own 44-year homosexual relationship, and ironically revealed all of America's consciousness, terrified and simultaneously titillated by the crumbling status quo.
The Stonewall Riots were light years away in the 50s. As in many apathetic eras, people were dieting, hiding, not rioting. Homosexuals were thought of as opportunistic pedophiles for all occasions who would just as soon violate a little girl as a little boy. Hoover's call to arms, which pinpointed "daughters" as the likely victims, was also a covert call to attack "abnormal" queers— understood to be effeminate men.
A straight-line extrapolation of that deviant paranoia would go something like this: Protect your sons and daughters by rooting out femininity in grown men!
Funny how some things never change. Paging J. K. Rowling . . . 2
Where is the crystal ball that tells us what today's sexual panics mean?
Well, for one, you have to work your kinky mojo just a little bit harder today to qualify as a social undesirable. You can't just be gay anymore; it doesn't cut the mustard. Trans vilification is now the tip of the spear. Same ulterior motives, of course. And the same “bathroom” obsessions, so similar to the Jim Crow racist hysterias.
American exceptionalist parents feel their children (that is, their own innocence, their own sexual anxiety) aren't so much threatened by gay (let alone trans) identity as by the specter of the weird loner: The 21st century incel!
We dread the person holed up in the ex-urbs, or out in the country somewhere, making up their own existence and using other people's bodies to help them achieve their catharsis.
It's a relief that at least SOME of the public sensibility of what makes someone dangerous is not that they're effeminate— but rather that they're dangerous because they're alienated.
That's a switch. The deviant of the twenty-first century is the man who doesn't know how to give or receive love.
This discovery has the potential to horrify us even more than their deeds.
But here's the thing about hunting perverts: you're usually looking in the wrong direction.
When I was a teen in the 70s, I had a couple of episodes where strangers threatened me. One of them was a perfect candidate for the sex panics at the time (businessman who picks up hitchhikers from the beach), and the other positioned himself in the bosom of normality (an undergrad studying in the public library).
As it turned out, the one who harassed, stalked, and threatened me for months was the guy who asked to borrow my pencil at the library.
The man who exposed his penis to my girlfriend and me while he drove us down Sunset Boulevard, got frightened and pulled over to let us out of the car the moment we ordered him to. I never saw him again.
The man in the library was handsome and chatty. The man in the car was ugly and soundless.
The only thing they had in common was that they preyed on someone, a young woman, whom they felt was appealing and nonthreatening.
The lesson I took from these episodes at the time was that I had gotten in trouble at the library because I had been deferential and polite, whereas my girlfriend in the car had countermanded the situation by giving the driver a direct order to pull over. She looked like she'd as soon pistol-whip him as speak to him.
I thought if I cultivated that look of hers, I'd be much better prepared for the world.
It's hard to prepare when you are predisposed and trained to be a nice girl. When I took my first self-defense class, I was amazed to see a 60-year-old classmate of mine show off what she was made of by swinging her purse like a banshee's broom at a pretend assailant. Meanwhile, my first instinct when attacked was to mentally leave my body and become effectively paralyzed.
My senior classmate was ready to fight; I wasn't, and it was partly because I was unwilling to be territorial, to control the situation, to take over. In other words, to defend yourself against pricks, you have to act a little more like them. Fleeing had to convert to fighting.
On my TV last night, I saw a movie trailer about a mother and her child who are stalked, terrorized, and almost rubbed out by a man who's tracing their every move on the Internet.
The villain looks just like the cute guy who started researching me in the library. A behind-the-scenes special feature interviews the lead actress who supposedly refused the first script because it was just another helpless female tied to the tracks, screaming and freaking every time Snidely Whiplash made another modern step in her direction.
"I didn't just want to be the typical female role, where I would only REACT," said the star.
Yes, but if she took charge, she would ruin the panic, ruin the empathy! Someone's got to be "the girl" and scream her head off, so we know we're still alive!
And some courageous girl, "The Final Girl," as film theorist Carol Clover dubbed her, has got to be the one who holds up a bright white shield and faces the monster down.
This is today's feminist twist to the sex-panic monster: instead of your husband or J. Edgar Hoover saving you, all the men in the story become consumed in the slime, and only the original symbol of innocence can save herself.
Meanwhile, many men these days are infuriated by the notion that everything bad is placed at their feet, that a fleet of injustices blamed upon the nearly extinct white male— but the annoying part of their complaint is that THEY created it.
Guilty men think the worst of other men; they can't be their own heroes anymore, especially when they believe that their sexual impulses can't be controlled. As long as they think they're barely-suppressed beasts who can only be controlled by a woman's gentle hand, or the arm of the law— they are prisoners of gender.
Morality panics of the future will continue to demonize male sexuality and flirt with the ideas of women's domination— or rather of femme domination, a sort of Amazon class of dykes, virgins, mothers, and drag queens.
Meanwhile, the "missing" children are better described as angry and impatient— sick of narcissistic boomers appropriating their lives to feed their own neuroses.
The youth culture knows there's a gender revolution going on, and they design their bodies and their tribe to express it. They will continue to travel in packs to defend themselves, and don't try to dissuade them by preaching against "gangs"— they know that's just a bourgeois way of dissing someone else's family.
America will boomerang between "Fear of a Black Planet," and Fear of Genderfuck Universe to the opposite horror: that of the lone man with a big gun— the had-all-the-opportunities-guy who now comes equipped with a bomb.
"Oh!" we'll say, "if he'd only been in the Crips!"
“If only he'd been a drag queen, if only he'd pierced his dick and gotten high on dope!”
Any of those would be preferable, a million times more humane.
We can understand a counter-culture, but what are we supposed to do with a counter-human? We can't stand to look at the cult of alienated masculinity, and wonder how we got here.
In Case You Missed It
True Stories From the American Past, ed. William Graebner (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993), 160–79
One of the interesting things I’ve been reading lately is a history of how “home swimming pools” proliferated not because of the wholesome intentions you might guess, but because in the 60s, thousands of public pools got drained and closed due to hysteria about “integration” — black and white kids sharing the same swim lanes. Same with private swim clubs, they also skyrocketed after segregation was banned.
Why the pleasure of swimming , which I love so much, has been blighted by the “toilet fears” that grip Americans in all their bigotries— makes me endlessly sick.
Did you know?— this is NEW— that the entire Master’s Swimming organization in North American, has banned “trans” participation in their programs and competitions?
Yeah, that’s what’s wrong with swimming these days, right? FUCK YOU MASTERS. Are there going to be locker room checks now to make sure I’m a real all-American woman? I’m so disgusted.
https://www.marketplace.org/story/2021/02/15/public-pools-used-to-be-everywhere-in-america-then-racism-shut-them-down
IN OTHER NEWS - Yes, this Thursday the 10th, I will reveal my menu and ice sculpture techniques, since I got so many impatient questions from you about how I won my artistic battle of the freezer on July 4th. . . . I thought I’d also catch up on Thursday with what I’ve been reading and watching this summer. I was asked to serve on 2 film juries, (Frameline and Jewish Film Fest) which is such a treat, and I have a couple of highlights to share. … Birding News: is there any greater pleasure than finding a road that’s been washed out for 2 years with no repair in sight, which then becomes a home for an abandoned telephone pole, aka, perfect osprey nest? Plus eagles clocking nearby trying to steal, steal, steal! Raptors like this are not everyday where I live. I plopped down on a broken patio chair I found in the bushes near the lagoon, and had the best Sunday I’ve had in a long time. The leftover pork same from our bbq may have helped! Also, Starling, you left your Dead bottle here and Larry, the Sun Ra bootleg is on constant rotation in the car, which is best CD player I’ve still got.