3 thoughts on “Beware — Blow Jobs!”

  1. After my first draft, I found that I had written, “Flanagan swallows the whole tale of a teenage blow job epidemic”. I think by accident. So I took that out. A better snark than I would have left it in. In fact, I’d wager that somewhere out there on the wide wide Internets somebody *did* leave it in.

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  2. Tangent alert!
    Tim, I am relieved to know there are first drafts of your eloquent and well-reasoned posts. This comment, in complete contrast, is right off the top of my head and certainly less than half baked. And mind you, I have not read the article. But I have read a fair amount about it, and in my own research I find myself dealing with claims that the US has gone through a “moral panic” about the sexual abuse of children.
    In that context, there’s no doubt that one can find wildly exaggerated statements about the dangers of child abduction in the early 1980s. And there undoubtedly were people who saw child molesters lurking everywhere then, too.
    But it seems to me that “moral panic” claims are often used to dismiss legitimate trends and concerns. I have no idea whether that is true in this teen oral-sex case. But I am quite familiar with specific child sexual abuse cases that had lots of evidence of guilt that have since been labeled as the product of “moral panic.”
    And I see the “moral panic” explanation swallowed–hook, line, and sinker–by all too many academics and members of the media.

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  3. I think that’s the nature of the moral panic, claim, RC. That it swamps both the truth of particular incidents and even the complex empirical question of trends or social transformation up into an encompassing narrative that both distorts our focused understanding of particular incidents and creates so much “noise” around the real problem of transformation that it becomes impossible to interpret it successfully, either whether it is happening or even more importantly, what it means that it is happening.
    Take the child sexual abuse panic of the 1980s and early 1990s. I have absolutely no hesitation labelling it as such. Labeling it as such shouldn’t allow us to forget both that there were genuine incidents of sexual abuse in daycare centers revealed during that time and that we may have discovered new underlying social facts about the sexual abuse of children by adults, particularly within the context of extended families. But think of all the things that got obscured as the collective experience of panic accelerated: not just that many people were falsely, sometimes absurdly, accused of abuse, but that some things which should have been debated both empirically and philosophically were taken off the table: whether “recovered memory” was either sufficient evidence for criminal charges or even empirically existed, or whether small children could in fact fabricate complicated narratives with intensely sexual and violent content without adult prompting. It wasn’t until later, after quite a few people had their lives destroyed, that there was a long deep breath and the messiness of those problems was reconsidered thoughtfully.
    The worst aspect of moral panics is that they are often institution-building: they leave concrete political and civic structures in their wake. They feed classes of experts who have a vested economic interest in keeping the panic alive. Even after the collective experience of a version of common sense deflates into more complex and nuanced truths, there are consequences that go beyond individual lives.
    So you’re right that people shouldn’t just dismiss out of hand the original cause or underlying problem that sparks such a panic. There were in fact Communists in government and civic life in the 1950s in the US and Western Europe who were acting on behalf of the Soviet Union. Elvis *was* being sexual. There was a new youth culture in the 1950s which sometimes included “antisocial” aspects. But in all cases, the logic of panic aligns all considerations of those changes in a certain direction, and stifles thoughtfulness about both the size and implications of the change or problem. Take the oral sex thing: even if it’s happening–something worth debating–I’m not real clear that it means what Flanagan takes it to self-evidently mean. The mood of panic is what lets her suddenly pass Go and collect $200.00 in the latter part of her article. That can’t be good, whether it’s just one writer or a whole segment of society.

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