history repeats itself: piece by Katha Pollitt from 1996 - yes, 1996 - still relevant [View all]

[Nine]

This is an excerpt from an essay written by Katha Pollitt in 1996. The essay is "Kissing and Telling," and it's collected in a book by her titled "Subject to Debate." I remembered the original article and found it on Google books. I had to manually type the following, but I think it's worth reading.

Well! I didn’t sit down to write about this. I sat down to write a piece in which, like every other columnist in America, I deplore and mock the nutty excesses of school administrators who in two separate, by now world-famous, incidents suspended six-year-old Johnathan Prevette of Lexington, North Carolina, and seven-year-old De’Andre Dearinge of Queens for “sexual harassment” – Johnathan kissed a girl in his class; De’Andre kissed a girl and tore a button from her skirt. I was going to wonder our loud how it happened that the first thing that comes to the mind of all too many people these days when they hear the word “feminism” is this sort of obsessive policing of daily life. I was going to bemoan school administrations, and bureaucrats generally, and grown-ups who impose outlandishly excessive punishments on small, bewildered children.

That’s all true – consider it bemoaned. But the real story here is the media frenzy. Chilldren are suspended every day, but Johnathan’s missed ice-cream party was an international scandal; De’Andre’s whole family was famous, until they stopped returning reporters’ calls after he punched and bit a teacher. Only some of the interest in these two children has to do with a commendable devotion to mildness and common sense. There’s also the wish to paint sexual harassment as the paranoid fantasy of joyless prudes. Two cases involving serious harassment got much less attention… (cases described)

The truth is, nobody – least of all the talk-show anti-P.C. brigade that has made these little boys celebrities – really believes that children’s behavior should go uncorrected or that it has no connection to the adults they will become. These are the people, after all, who are usually calling for more discipline. If Jonathan and De’Andre had kissed other boys, I doubt columnist John Leo would have found them so adorable…

Compare this to the recent case of Hunter Yelton. I highly recommend reading the whole essay by doing a Google book search.