Read on Twitter
I'm going to say a bit more about this passage from @roddreher and how it illustrates that social conservatives are constantly *projecting* when they complain about the left "sexualizing children." In fact, it is almost always the case that they are sexualizing children.
More than anything, the passage reminds me of a speech I quote in my book, *The 4-H Harvest,* given by the psychologist, Dr. Hedley Dimock, at the 1935 National 4-H Congress.
As you can see in the passage from the book, Dimock was quite transparent about his position. He celebrated 4-H for doing what Rod is suggesting: offering a wholesome place to socialize "heterosexual relations."
Dimock's fear was less that young women would abandon heterosexuality (Rod's fear) and more that they would promiscuously over-indulge in too many men. In other words, through 4-H, a rural girl could meet a rural boy, date, marry, and avoid the degeneracy of the city.
As my book shows, Dimock's view of 4-H was consistent with how the USDA and 4-H's organizers viewed it. They worried white rural youth were fleeing farms for the city where, in the grips of rotten sexual morality, they would contribute to lower birth rates and race suicide.
They saw 4-H not just as a way to educate rural youth about farming and homemaking practices, but also about healthy family life and "heterosexual relations." The idea was to marry the good ones off to each other and keep them down on the farm.
It turns out, of course, that the gendering of farm labor was integral to heterosexual relations--an attractive wife was a good homemaker, so doing heterosexuality required novel idea of gendered labor on farms that was more rigid and patriarchal than what had come before.
And determining which rural youth were the "good" ones worth keeping (and who was the dross worth losing) was also wrapped up in eugenic ideas. The USDA believed it could quantify the "quality" of rural youth and then encourage the good ones to marry and reproduce.
They organized contests at county fairs to evaluate and rank rural youth according to narrow eugenic bodily aesthetics. Although there were hundreds of thousands of black 4-Hers in the South, they were systematically excluded from 4-H health contests.
The USDA and its allies was invested in socializing heterosexual desire among rural youth and then attaching that desire to a specific and narrow bodily aesthetics. In very simple terms, they were "sexualizing children" consistent with their expansive vision of rural reform.
Having written this book, I have occasionally run into the complaint--usually implied but sometimes quite explicit--that by viewing 4-H through the analytic lenses of the history of gender and sexuality, *I* was "sexualizing" children.
I was taking something innocent and pure and making it about "sex." These were usually complaints from people who had not read the book and didn't understand it, but I've heard the *implicit* complaint even from academics with nostalgic views of the program and rural America.
There was a time when this bothered me quite a bit, but I'm mostly amused by it now. In retrospect, my book, whatever its strengths, is *not* a social history of children and is mostly indifferent to the *experience* of rural children.
I do not, for example, claim that the USDA was *successful* in socializing heterosexuality as they hoped. My interest is in *the implicit fantasy of their scheme*; why and how purported bureaucrats of agriculture came to become so invested in the bodies and sex of children.
Circling back to Rod, this is the larger object lesson: reactionaries such as Rod charge that the "left" is trying to pervert and corrupt children, encouraging deviancy and debasing traditional heterosexuality.
To prevent this, they hope to "socialize" heterosexuality. In doing so, they propose to micromanage and discipline the desires and bodies of children in ways that few on the left have ever considered.
Indeed, the loudest drumbeat of leftist approaches to the sex of children is that it's okay for them to develop into the kind of person they want to be, that children are entitled to measures of respect, dignity, and autonomy around their desires.
Good queer critique on this issue note that reactionary "save the children" campaigns like Rod's tend to prioritize their own fantasies of social order over the concrete interests of actual children, interests that may materially depart from their parents in dramatic ways.
So-called "reparative therapy" is a good example, but so too is the reactionary approach to adult sexual predation on children. Reactionaries frame the issue around reinforcing the power of parents to protect vulnerable children from dangerous and predatory strangers.
But the actual empirical research suggests that most predation occurs within the family not from without. As @fischermyn puts it, the actual empirical evidence suggests the primary figures of predation should be step-dads and moms' boyfriends, the most common perpetrators.
The problem is that recognizing this means troubling narratives of traditional heteromasculinity that invest those figures with unquestioned patriarchal authority. Noting that they are more likely to abuse means questioning the intrinsic "goodness" of heterosexuality.
And all of this requires thinking about sex without retreating into a panicked narrative about the "bad" sex the kids these days want. That panic is an ideological projection onto youth. It is exactly the "sexualization of children" reactionaries pretend is coming from the left.
