Regulating Desire
GENDER AND THE LAW
Regulating Desire: From the Virtuous Maiden to the Purity Princess
Interview with J. Shoshanna Ehrlich (August 2015)
by Lindsay M. Geller
Editor’s Introduction
Every society struggles with managing unruly desires, and every society worries about maintaining a social order. In the following comprehensive interview, J. Shoshanna Ehrlich looks at America’s efforts to reign in female sexuality. In her book Regulating Desire: From the Virtuous Maiden to the Purity Princess and in her interview here, Professor Ehrlich considers five distinct time periods in America’s recent past to understand how our changing society gave rise to collective anxieties about youthful female sexuality, and how we tried to keep it in check. As with Prohibition, these efforts have largely failed: you cannot keep desire in check. In the end, it may be that no nation can successfully legislate social engineering – but her account of our efforts to do so are revealing.
It is a timely subject. Concern over the sexuality of young females is very much present today. This is scholarship of real substance, and as rewarding to read as it is challenging. This is not a matter for lawyers and judges, but something that needs to be a discussion in our high school and college classrooms as well.
In a larger context, Professor Ehrlich’s thorough overview of America’s shifting attitudes towards female sexuality is an indication of how rewarding gender studies can be. It can serve as an introduction for general readers to the high value of gender studies as a whole. In a recent article in History Today, historian and author Joanna Bailey argues the pervasiveness of gender studies. She proposes that gender studies deserve to be in the center of our considerations, integrated into all manner of historical studies, and not relegated to a separate genre. War, for example, is closely tied to masculine and feminine identities. Bailey writes:
War is a crucible for ideas about gender and a catalyst in reconstructing gender identities. The men who fought in the Great War shared a vision of manliness that prompted them to fight, shaped their experiences during and after the war, their ability to communicate their feelings and their treatment when injured and in postwar society.
Similarly, criminal justice is bound up with gender: “Crime and the criminal justice system,” Bailey writes, “were shaped by ideas on appropriate behaviour for men and women.”
So both for its own subject matter and as an introduction to gender studies, Lindsay Geller’s smart interview with Shoshanna Ehrlich carries a double value.
J. Shoshanna Ehrlich is Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She is the author of Family Law for Paralegals, Sixth Edition and Who Decides? The Abortion Rights of Teens.
Interview

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting La Ghirlandata (1873) depicts a woman with her sensuality intact. – The British Library
1. From seduction criminalization in the 1850’s to abstinence-only education in the 2000’s, how could you characterize the five time periods examined in your book and the various attitudes (of purity reformers, politicians, and the general public) towards female desire?
The way I conceptualized the book is that, when I started, I never thought I’d end up
going back to the 1830s. As I began to dig and look at periods, the earliest period that dealt with regulating women’s sexuality I thought I’d get myself back to was the early 1900’s. Instead, what I discovered is that in each chapter there seems to be — going back to the 1800s — a pattern where you start with a broad social reform movement that’s created by some response to some sort of anxiety (some sort of rapid change socially, culturally). Then, a group of reformers seems to narrow their focus and look at young women’s sexuality as something particularly problematic, dangerous, and in need of some kind of legal reform measure.
The first chapter focuses on the campaign by moral reformers to criminalize seduction. This really grew out of the Second Great Awakening, which in a way grew out of repudiating Calvinism and the idea that our destinies were set by God so social reform didn’t really have much meaning. The Second Great Awakening really talked about how the world could be reformed and pave the way for Christ. So it was really up to people to go out, change the world, reform sin in order to cleanse the nation, so that led to this huge social reform movement. There were these biblical-track societies and these moral reform societies that focused generally on sin and sinfulness.
Then, one of the leaders of this movement began to focus on reforming prostitutes and getting them to repent of their sinful ways. So there was this focus on prostitution and this kind of reconfiguration [of thought] to argue that prostitutes were not innately lustful, but were victims of male lust, greed, and therefore, they were deserving of being saved.
From that movement to save prostitutes, a number of female moral reformers involved in that effort began to turn their attention from prostitutes as “fallen women” to the dangers awaiting young women who moved from the country to the city for employment purposes. They saw urbanization and cities as the bastion of sin and corruption and thought it was incumbent on them to protect these innocent country girls from the corruption of the city and to save their virtue from evil lustful men who were awaiting them around every corner to steal their virtue. So that was the first time, as far as I’ve been able to tell, that the American Female Moral Reform Society really turned to the law in order to address issues of female sexuality (not young women’s behavior) to protect them from unscrupulous men.
Those movements really focused on protecting women, but it also was a way of controlling their sexuality.
The second chapter focuses on what ultimately turned out to be a much bigger campaign to raise the age of sexual consent. Essentially, that emerged in the Postbellum [or Reconstruction] Era in the second half of the nineteenth century. A number of doctors and public health officials began to argue that prostitution should be regulated in the United States. It was the idea that they [prostitutes] were responsible for the spread of venereal disease and that if it [prostitution] were made legal (a system that was in place in Paris and in England), that would mean that prostitutes would be subject to mandatory bi-weekly inspections. They would be given certificates of clean health if they were found to be disease-free or forcibly quarantined in hospitals and treated until they were disease-free. So these doctors began to argue that this should be the system.
In response, there was an organization called the New York Committee for the Prevention of State Regulation of Vice that came together to fight this effort to regulate prostitution. A number of women were particularly influential, including, for example Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to graduate from medical school. Essentially, they argued quite forcibly against this, saying that this was really a plot to create disease-free women for men’s benefit. [They believed] this was really denigrating to women and that if the government was serious about dealing with the spread of disease that men who visited prostitutes should be subject to the same rules and requirements. They said this was, in a way, treating women like sexual slaves, commodities purely to gratify male lust.
This then blossomed into a wider social purity movement in the United States. Someone in England published this sensationalist journalistic piece regarding young women being sold into prostitution at really young ages for the pleasure of men. A group of women who were purity reformers thought that was terrible, and thought that, of course in the United States, we must have laws prohibiting that to protect young women’s virtue. In fact, it turned out that the age of sexual consent in the United States was lower than it was in England – ten in most states.
They [the purity reformers] were horrified and launched this campaign to raise the age of sexual consent. Both of those movements really focused on protecting women, but it also was a way of controlling their sexuality.

A Maiden in Contemplation, Gaston La Touche (1898) – An image of purity in a woman.
In the third period covered, which is the Progressive Era, there were a lot of reforms. A different way came into being, at least among the middle class. Activists and reformers reenvisioned childhood, seeing it (and adolescence, as well) more as a separate stage of development. There was growing belief in this idea that children should not be treated the same way as adults, needed to be sheltered from responsibility, and given a period of life to mature into adulthood. This was the era when child labor laws were passed, compulsory school attendance laws were passed, and then directly relevant to the book, this was also when the juvenile courts were first established. The idea being that children were entitled to be rehabilitated rather than punished because, until that point, children were generally tried in adult courts. There was very much this rehabilitative ethos that led to the creation of these courts.
There are a lot of debates about whether this was truly a liberal progressive vision or a way for the state to take more control over the working class and immigrant children. Again, more directly relevant here, although boys were by far and away the primary people brought into juvenile court, and probably it’s fair to say that’s who was envisioned as the primary target because they were most likely to be breakers of the law. Progressive Reformers also began to increasingly put a specific focus on young women as delinquents, but their behavior was understood very differently. According to the studies, the overwhelming majority of girls brought before juvenile court were there because of sexual delinquency. That [same] conduct in boys was not seen quite as criminal. Status offenses — behaviors that are not treated as crimes when committed by adults like truancy, immorality — were offenses juveniles could be brought into court for. These status offenses of immorality were generally attached to girls. And in fact, this term “sexual delinquents” was really synonymous with “female delinquents.”
It was a separate category that reformers began to focus more and more on. It also was in a way a response to large waves of immigrants who were squeezed into tenement houses. There was this concern for people who really were desperately poor, perhaps not English speaking, and living in incredibly unsanitary and overcrowded conditions. That’s where a lot of the debate comes around Progressive Era reform — whether it was triggered by this desire to “Americanize” immigrants and bring them up to middle class “standards” or whether it really was a very passionate and caring concern for people who were desperately poor with very little hope.

Russian Cold War poster.
The Cold War impacted the ideology of gender
Chapter 4 focuses on the teen pregnancy “problem.” Following World War II you see the emergence of the population control movement, which initially focused on the differential birthrates between developed and developing countries. Many of them were part of that anti-Communist Cold War ideology, which saw overpopulation in the “third world” as a breeding ground for Marxism. Some believed the United States and developed countries needed to step in and promote population control in order to prevent another world war. After some time with this global focus, some population experts applied the same lens in a very racialized way to the inner cities in the United States. They particularly started talking about black women as overbreeding and overpopulating, which they believed would lead to explosive conditions in the cities and was something population control folks needed to turn their attention to.
In short, there was then the development of Title X, which is federally-funded family planning. Again, [there were] debates about some of its origins — whether it had a eugenic component aimed at controlling poor women’s birth (but I think that it also did have a feminist component) because there were arguments that middle class women were able to take advantage of the contraceptive revolution and could go to their doctors and have much more control over their reproduction that was not available to poor women. So again, just like those debates in the earlier era, some of that tension was woven into the origins of federally-funded family planning.
In any event, again what happened was that as birth rates of adult women began to fall and studies showed there were less unplanned or unwanted pregnancies, suddenly attention shifted to teens. People began to argue that it was teens whose pregnancy rates were completely out of control and that teen pregnancy – as opposed to welfare mom pregnancy – began to be this huge, huge focus. This then led to teens being a targeted population for family planning efforts and programs focused on helping young women be prepared for motherhood.
There may have been a benefit for women to present themselves as lacking passion.
The last chapter focuses on the origins of abstinence-only education as a federally-enacted policy. That grew out of the 1980s, the new Christian Right, the election of Ronald Reagan, the moral majority, and the “pro-family movement.” Again, similarly, the initial focus was pretty sweeping. It wasn’t just focused on young women’s sexuality, but it was kind of to reverse liberalism, to take back the nation from the secular humanists with the homosexual agenda, the legalization of abortion, etc. The federal government was seen as this enemy — there were Supreme Court decisions requiring the desegregation of schools, there was the revocation of favorable tax policies for private, Christian-funded schools that resisted desegregation orders.
So it was just seen as the nation going to hell in a handbasket. As part of the need to “take back the country,” a group of particular Conservatives began to focus on publicly-funded contraceptives and their availability to teens. They talked about how there needed to be a major effort to end the government’s sponsorship of adolescent promiscuity.
Unlike the other reforms, which were absolutely female-focused, the law around abstinence focuses on young men and young women. It’s gender neutral, but if you look through (which I do for the book) the hearing transcripts that led up to the abstinence-only laws, there’s much greater talk about the impact of this “culture of promiscuity” on young women and how it’s ruining their lives. So concerns about girls’ sexuality and “promiscuity” fueled the move to those laws much more than a focus on young men’s sexuality. If you look at a lot of the curriculum that’s been funded with abstinence-only money, they’re steeped in gender stereotypes.
2. Similar to the US government’s attempt to control alcohol consumption with Prohibition, legislation to control female desire did not stop young women from engaging in sex. Therefore, what role does legislation have in social reform? Can legislation influence social reform (as attempted with abstinence-only education) or is it generally more effective for social reform to inform legislation (as with sexual consent laws)?
There’s lots and lots and lots that’s been written on this topic – sort of which is the chicken and which is the egg. The way I would see it is [as] a two-way street. Abstinence education was clearly passed in order to change behavior. That’s explicitly the goal – to re-enfold children back into the family order and have parents control their children’s sexuality by having them [children] taught in the schools that, essentially, it’s unacceptable to have any kind of sexual relationship outside of marriage. So it’s clearly intended to change behavior. At the same time, I think it’s important to realize that that initiative didn’t come out of nowhere. It was deeply rooted in a conservative social change movement – the pro-family movement. It was designed to change behavior but it is also reflective of a movement that was already embracing those kinds of values. I think there’s a dynamic relationship.
When I was young, sexual harassment was not defined as a legal wrong. Then there was a change legally – and I think that in some ways obviously there’s still issues of sexual harassment – but the legal change took something that had been seen as okay and normal and natural and defined it as a civil rights violation. I think was very important and very powerful in terms of sending a message about what the boundaries are of acceptable workplace behavior so it was both, again, designed to shape and change ways of interaction. At the same time, it didn’t arise out of nowhere. Again, [it was] very much rooted in second wave feminism that began to challenge those normative assumptions about what was fine at work. So again, from my perspective, I think the two go hand in hand.
3. How does US society and legislation focused on female sexuality affect different ethnic or demographic groups? What role has discrimination played in female sexuality legislation?
I have two examples from the book. The first goes back to the Progressive Era because the concern and the focus and the monitoring was absolutely class-driven. Even though middle class young women were breaking tradition, experimenting more with a more liberated model of sexuality, working class culture took place in much more public places — on the streets, in dance halls, in movie theaters, where it was seen as out of control, as something that needed to be monitored. So this whole concept of delinquency was highly gendered.
For young women, it almost always involved sexuality but it was also very classed because middle class girls usually escaped this public scrutiny of their behavior. Many of the impoverished “working girls,” as the term was used, were also from immigrant families. Their behavior was seen as much more disruptive of the social order because it was much more public and also one of the [society’s] greatest fears is that they would slide into prostitution. I think that fear didn’t attach to middle class girls so there was also that sense that they [working class girls] needed to be stopped before they fell into disrepute.
There was always this historic white line between good girls and bad girls, and bad girls were prostitutes, so there was a need to keep those boundaries erected. The other piece, again keeping in that period, was in terms of the gendered aspect, young women were seen as being much less capable of rehabilitation than young men in large part because sexual transgressions were seen as worse than any other kind. Again, there was this kind of general panic about sexual disorder as disrupting social boundaries, and so, between young men and young women, there was this profound gender distinction.
But then, in particular with girls, there was this class distinction. There was yet another distinction because young black women were seen as having even less rehabilitative potential than immigrant or other poor young women. It was explained in terms of their African ancestry which was regarded as inferior to European ancestry, and also the legacy of slavery leaving young black women as more compromised sexually. So I think that although it wasn’t written into the law, these concerns prompted the law and how you were treated once you were in the system.
The other played out in a different way. In the seventies, there began to be this panic around what was referred to as the “teen pregnancy epidemic.” Person after person talked about it and testified before Congress about this “teen pregnancy epidemic,” [saying] that the rate was spiraling out of control and that something needed to be done to stop children from having children and young women destroying their lives. Well, that sounds like it makes sense, but I think it’s important to know a couple of things. First of all, the teen pregnancy rate was actually higher in the 1950s but it was disguised because middle class, white girls either got married or were sent off by their families to maternity homes and forced into giving up their babies for adoption.
The pattern was different for black teens. First of all, there were racist policies and many maternity homes wouldn’t accept young black women who were pregnant. The other [difference] is – and there’s a lot of different explanations – but some historians have written that they also tended to be supported more by extended family. So what happened though in the seventies is that the pattern among young, white teens began to appear more like what had always been seen as this racialized other. [Many said] “Black girls are promiscuous and they have babies,” but you could kind of hide what happened with white teens because they would get rid of the evidence either by putting the baby up [for adoption] or getting married.

Magazine cover regarding Title IX, one of the laws most influential on gender
With the women’s movement, that began to change. More young, white women began keeping their children. As this problem spread to what one person has called “the girl next door,” lawmakers –when it began to affect middle class teen girls and legislators talked about “our daughters” – began to create an effort to address this issue of teen pregnancy. So as long as it [teen pregnancy] was an issue lawmakers could sort of say didn’t affect them, their families, or their daughters, there was no concern about it. As it began to spread beyond a sort of racialized boundary and disrupt patterns, there began to be a lot of attention paid to teen pregnancy.
4. How has American society reacted to male desire? What landmark moments have caused the most lasting changes in our attitudes toward male desire?
I think a dominant motif has been that it’s natural and normal in males. In contrast to
females, it’s missing or if it’s not missing, it’s abnormal and she’s been kind of corrupted. That’s one of the real motifs I found when I looked at the abstinence only curriculum – this idea that in boys it’s natural and in girls something wrong has happened to her if there’s some sense of authentic [sexual] expression. Well, it’s not seen as authentic in girls. So I think that that would be the most dominant way I would describe it.
In terms of lasting changes, one of the things going back to the first two movements in
my book…you can argue that in some ways those movements are very repressive sexually
because they were really built around this idea of the absolute importance of virginity to girls.
They believed that girls ruined their lives if it was “taken” from them and they lost their crown of virtue. On the other hand, it was more radical because it challenged this idea that this model of innate male uncontrollable lust was natural, instead saying that it was really used as an excuse that enabled men to have untrammeled access to women’s bodies.
This focus on preserving virginity was kind of a hedge against social disorder.
In some ways, their arguments really anticipated second wave feminism by challenging
this construction of male’s desire as uncontrollable. I don’t think it made a lasting change, but I think it’s a very important contribution. In fact, going back to the effort to regulate prostitution, what the doctors argued is that this idea that you can reform male desire was “as foolish as trying to dry up the Atlantic ocean or arrest the movement of the earth around the sun,” basically saying it was so entrenched, embodied in who men were that any attempt to regulate or control was completely crazy and foolhardy. So again, I don’t think it made a lasting impact, but I think it was a really important moment.
Also, they argued that the laws all embodied this bias towards uncontrollable male desire. I probably would say that second wave feminism really began to challenge that which was seen as natural as really a justification for male domination and sexual exploitation of women. Then, the things that had been seen as stemming from natural male desire were considered crimes and really an invasion of women’s rights to bodily integrity. So I would point to that as really transformative moment.
5. What is the significance that, in attempts to debunk the double standard of sexuality, purity reformers focused on reining in male lust rather than allowing women to explore greater sexual freedom?
It was really off the table for them so that you don’t actually, at least not what I found when I went back through primary source materials. It was just a given for them. In their conversations, there’s really no discussion (that I found) as to whether or not there could be any rethinking that virginity was just the gold standard of a woman’s life. I don’t think they felt any need to explain or justify that. I mean, that’s why in some ways they get pegged as very repressive and conservative. Again, as I just said, I think that is one strand, although there is also, I think, this pretty radical challenge to male sexual privilege. But I think there are a couple of things (even though they don’t say it) that can explain why they felt they needed to hold [virginity] tight, tight, tight and thought men should be held to women’s standards rather than open up more avenues for women to explore their sexuality.
One [reason for these beliefs] is that most of the reformers were middle class, and there’s some evidence that working class women may have had a different understanding or different view towards sexuality that wasn’t quite as repressed. So this focus on preserving virginity was kind of a hedge against social disorder and a way to hold onto this view of middle class propriety – the centerpiece of which was marriage and female virtue. So that’s one possibility — that it was just too threatening to their view of the world to even think about altering those kinds of behaviors.
Nancy Cott, a historian, said there may have been a benefit for women to present themselves as lacking passion because we’re talking about a time period where women really were not respected. It wasn’t really accepted for women to step out into the world in very active ways but, by framing themselves as and being seen as inherently more moral than men, it gave them a platform that justified their moving out into social reform activities. So rather than trying to be “like men,” women had a special, moral superiority. They benefited from being seen that way. So that’s another perspective.
6. What other scholarship in this field would you recommend to the general reader?
I thought of some books:
The Politics of Virginity: Abstinence in Sex Education by Alesha E. Doan & Jean Calterone Williams
Wake Up little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe v. Wade by Rickie Solinger
When Sex Goes to School: Warring Views on Sex—and Sex Education—Since the Sixties by Kristin Luker
Condom Nation: The U.S. Government’s Sex Education Campaign from World War 1 to the Internet by Alexandra Lord
Abortion & Life by Jennifer Baumgardner
Who Decides? The Abortion Rights of Teens by J. Shoshanna Ehrlich
7. What do you think of the double-edged sword of legislation that simultaneously attempts to protect young women from bodily harm, while at the same time, controlling the ways in which they can sexually express themselves?
In the book itself, I think that all of the laws — with the exception of the laws in the period talking about the extension of family services, which were not focused on sexuality (it was as if teenagers got pregnant without having sex… purely instrumental) — really did have that dual function. There is sexual exploitation, and I think all of them were concerned about that. I think those laws said to men, “Young women’s bodies are not just yours for the taking.” I think that there was a protection [aspect] but that wasn’t repressive protection, it was making real this idea of sexual exploitation. At the same time, the first two time periods simply assumed that young women had no sexual desire and that the law needed to make sure it was doing everything it could to ensure that girls would remain virgins. So, in that way, they were built on and reinforced the social conventions and norms.
I think that the Progressive Era’s laws and juvenile court system was actually the first time that laws saw young women and their bodies as something that needed to be controlled because they were acting out sexually. Again, I think that young women were vulnerable in workplaces, so there’s a tension there because I think there was genuine sexual exploitation and harassment. On the other hand, one study talked about how the sexual delinquents didn’t feel any remorse or regret for their behavior. What I write about in the book is that maybe they did it not because they were hardened and immoral but because they had a different understanding of what was acceptable sexual behavior. There was a changing and challenging of norms that, rather than being seen as “an entry into the modern world” so to speak (I don’t like that phrasing, but a sort of changing times and attitudes), it was always read as delinquency that needed to be controlled and monitored by the state.
The interesting thing, in that regard, is in those earlier periods, I think there is that duality. In the abstinence-only education movement, which is the most modern, I think it’s purely repressive. I don’t think there is a duality. It’s like “Sex is bad. It’s wrong. Don’t do it. Wait until you get married. Horrific things will happen to you if you do” and so in some ways, that to me is purely saying teen sex is bad, wrong, and harmful — and particularly to young women.
8. Your new work is entitled “Turning Women into Girls” and examines the ironic legislation (touched upon in your current work) that young women are believed capable enough to make the decision to become a mother but too immature to make the decision to abort her pregnancy without adult involvement. How does this type of “legal dualism” relate to other aspects of young women’s sexuality, and how has it been perpetuated in previous time periods?
My new work goes back in a way and builds upon earlier work I’ve done on abortion where — I don’t agree with this but it’s been an assumption — the law can treat young women differently than adult women and can limit their abortion rights in ways that are not permissible for adult women. Although I challenge that in my writing, it nonetheless is completely built into legal structures and Supreme Court decisions.
In 2007, the Supreme Court upheld a ban on late term abortions in Gonzales vs. Carhart. The major justification was that women may come to regret their abortions, and that problem is particularly severe with late term abortions, which might lead to a more profound anguish and grief. They also said part of the reason it’s even worse with late term is that [the process is] so gruesome that doctors don’t like to give women all the information. So rather than requiring some kind of informed consent, the court essentially said that because women may suffer emotionally, these kind of abortions can’t be performed legally unless the woman would die if she carried the pregnancy to term. So I argue (and I’m working with a colleague on a new book) looking at how this idea of abortion regret is being used to divest adult women of full decisional control over abortions and regulating them to the realm of adolescence where that kind of control has already been upheld as valid and legitimate.
9. What types of studies in the field do you hope to see next?
One thing is there’s been a lot of research on abstinence ed and whether it impacts rates of sexual activity (the rates at which people have sex, how many sex partners, etc.), and the research says no it doesn’t.
I was talking to a colleague of mine who’s a university professor in a state with a strong abstinence ed approach to sex ed, and she was talking about seeing a difference in young women now as opposed to pre-abstinence ed. In a general sense, she noted just their lack of knowledge and understanding and sexual agency. It’s not so much how many sexual partners or what age, but in some ways in a more broad sense — what messages by reading the [abstinence-only] curricular are being given to young women about their sense of self as a person who’s entitled to sexual desire?
I think it’d be interesting to look at how, not so much in a quantitative but in a qualitative sense, young women who’ve gone through abstinence ed versus comprehensive sex ed in terms of their sense of the right to own their own desire and how it is reconfiguring senses of self.
10. What three things would you like a general reader to take away from your book?
I think that one is that when there’s a lot of focus and attention particularly around young women owning their own sexuality and that being seen as wrong, as problematic, as sort of a “new problem,” that this has been a historically recurring anxiety people have had. It’s really important to think about why we continue to have a double standard. When I did my book reading, I asked how many people think there’s still a sexual double standard, and almost the entire audience raised their hands. And so, what are the roots and origins and meaning of that and what impact that has on young women’s lives?
People really need to challenge abstinence-only education. I think that it’s a very pernicious trend, and I also think people need to understand that it’s a law. It’s federally-funded so that it still exists. We’ve spent millions and millions and millions of taxpayer dollars on abstinence-only education, so it’s not just a single school here or there. It’s a federal policy.
Under Obama there’s now alternatives as well, but abstinence-only education is still funded. The idea that sexuality is wrong and shouldn’t be talked about is a really problematic idea so that would be the second issue.
A third issue is for people to have a greater understanding of how (and this kind of relates to the second) the law, in general, shapes our understanding of sexual behavior. For example, what statutory rape laws say about adolescent sexuality and consent because in some states, including Massachusetts, it also punishes same age intimate relationships so that’s just one example. So I think people tend to think of the law as having to do with crime and criminals but it’s much more pervasive.
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I guess that as one of Fanon’s “Wretched” and trivialized as possibly lost in Mrs. Clinton’s “Basket of Deplorables” my compassion for gender issues may seem enigmatic. But not to an honest and reverent academic like you professor Ehrlich. Soon I’ll be returning to the public library Marsha C. Nussbaum’s “Anger and Forgiveness” which I read in part only because of what I found to be my difficulty in understanding due to my dearth of knowledge of Greek and Roman concepts and philosophy.
Good luck with your life’s work and best wishes to Fred.