2/21/21 sex education versus sex paranoia

Here is the link to my February 21, 2021, Twitter thread about actual sex studies and comprehensive sex education versus sex scandal and paranoia.

Thank you for reading. Please enjoy.

2/19/21 why it's important to read the book Delinquent Daughters

Here is the link to my February 19, 2021, Twitter thread about why I feel it's important for more people to read Mary E. Odem's book Delinquent Daughters.

Thank you for reading. Please enjoy.

6/30/19 close reading of a passage from Delinquent Daughters

Here is the link to my June 30, 2019, Twitter thread close reading of a passage from Mary E. Odem's book Delinquent Daughters.

My goal, as my thread states, was to show that modern age of consent laws in the United States are closely tied to sex work laws.

As I think Odem's book shows plainly, the only reason the age of legally recognized consent to sex was raised in the United States was because the social purists trying to fully criminalize sex work were not getting sex work fully criminalized quickly enough. They used the age of consent to generate sex paranoia in America. That paranoia of youth sex helped raise the age of consent, pass laws like the Mann Act, and fully criminalize sex work in the United States.

Since that time, the paranoia of youth sex has been a kind of vicious cycle in the US. Each time the government decides new sex laws need to be passed, they carry out a campaign to generate more paranoia of youth sex.

This paranoia generates consensus for stricter sex laws in the US, leading from the Mann Act, to the 1970s child pornography laws, to the 1990s sex education and sex exploitation laws, to the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, to FOSTA-SESTA, and, now, to attempts to restrict all kinds of freedoms of expression, for youths and adults, that we're seeing in our current laws.

This all has its roots in a very close tie between sex work laws, the paranoia of youth sex, and age of consent laws.

Nevertheless, almost no sex work decriminalization activists want to admit just how closely age of consent laws and sex work laws are to each other.

If we don't critically assess our laws about the age of legally recognized consent to sex in America, and if we keep on suppressing America's history of paranoia about youth sex, we will most likely not only always be at the whim of politicians who make whatever laws they want about our sexuality, but also in grave danger of sending our country into a bad place, because by this point, our mass psychology is, at least at times, very much driven by this one specific paranoia.

Thank you for reading. Please enjoy.

1/29/19 review of the book Delinquent Daughters, by Mary E. Odem

Here is the link to my January 29, 2019, Twitter thread review of the book Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885-1920, by Mary E. Odem.

Twitter's platform has twisted each of my threads through 2018 and 2019 out of chronological order. This thread is affected, but is still moderately coherent. My apologies.

Thank you for reading. Please enjoy.