Moral Panics, Sex Panics

Fear and the Fight over Sexual Rights

Gilbert Herdt

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780814737323
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Finalist for 2010 LGBT Anthology Award from the Lambda Literary Awards

Unwed teen mothers, abortion, masturbation, pornography, gay marriage, sex trafficking, homosexuality, and HIV are just a few in a long line of issues that have erupted into panics. These sexual panics spark moral crusades and campaigns, defining and shaping how we think about sexual and reproductive rights. The essays in Moral Panics, Sex Panics focus on case studies ranging from sex education to AIDS to race and the "down low," to illustrate how sexuality is at the heart of many political controversies. The contributors also reveal how moral and sexual panics have become a mainstay of certain kinds of conservative efforts to win elections and gain power in moral, social, and political arenas. Moral Panics, Sex Panics provides new and important insights into the role that key moral panics have played in social processes, arguing forcefully against the political abuse of sex panics and for the need to defend full sexual and reproductive rights.

Contributors: Cathy J. Cohen, Diane DiMauro, Gary W. Dowsett, Janice M. Irvine, Carole Joffe, and Saskia Eleonora Wieringa.

1
Introduction

Moral Panics, Sexual Rights, and Cultural Anger

Gilbert Herdt

Moral panics are the natural disasters of human society, and, like tsunamis and hurricanes, they not only present a crisis for stable social order but also contain much that threatens the well-being of individuals and communities.¹ The social context of moral panics, the sense in which individuals and groups are perceived to pose a threat, the political invention and mobilization of this risk in the media and imagination, and whether these panics are spontaneous or socially generated, have long been debated. Such panics and great fears can be short or long term. However, the more serious they are and the longer they endure, the greater the likelihood that societies will deal with them through the production of the reactive mechanisms of surveillance, regulation, discipline, and punishment. When sexualized, moral panics appear to “have much in common with the religious disputes of earlier centuries.”² Today, however, the cohesion and linkage of successive panics as part of a general process of cultural anger employed to massage fear suggests the need for a new way of thinking about and analyzing these human disasters.

Sexual crises are known from such historically disparate phenomena as the fear of the masturbation “epidemic” that haunted the 18th and 19th centuries, moral crusades against abortion and unwed teenage mothers, antipornography campaigns, efforts to criminalize prostitution through attacks on the trafficking of women, and panics surrounding homosexuality and HIV in the 20th century. What marks each of these cultural happenings as “panics” is the level to which the societal and personal expressions are out of proportion with the threat posed by the so-called “folk devils” (e.g., masturbating children, unwed mothers) and evil-doers (e.g., homosexuals) groups. In the worst cases, the rights of these persons are qualified or revoked, undermining citizenship and threatening democracy. By citizenship, I mean the full rights, entitlements, and opportunity structures that support household security³ and well-being (“life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”) in the public domain as well as in the private lives of individuals. As the studies in this book reveal, cultural reactions of such an extreme kind are not rare; in fact, they seem to be growing more frequent. These panics provoke a cultural anger in the service of moral regulation⁴ that targets the vulnerable in societies, compelling the contributing authors in this book to examine how panics provoke new techniques for governing others or for governing the self in the effort to strengthen well-being and social rights.

One of the contentions of this introduction is that moral panics in the United States are also becoming increasingly sexualized–for cultural and political purposes, in part through the Internet.⁵ Examples range from panics having to do with gays in the Boy Scouts, fears of STDs, Janet Jackson’s bra “malfunction” on television, and fears of oversexed women teachers in the classroom. For example, sociologist Janice Irvine reveals how, in the context of official U.S. government abstinence-only sex education, high school teachers are barred from discussing condoms, homosexuality, and other issues or they can be fired:⁶ that is the power of a moral sexual panic that becomes institutionalized over time. As François Girard (2004) has noted, much of this sexual content is antiwoman and antigay. Longer term, the impetus for the sexual preoccupation “within the triangle of class, race, and nationality”⁷ involves both the saturation and commercialization of sex in the United States and elsewhere, as well as the rise of neoconservatives and religious fundamentalism that is associated with sexual panics and moral politics. Some current observers believe that moral panics are becoming increasingly frequent and more prominent,⁸ especially in the media. As argued below, the cultural politics surrounding homosexuality in countries such as the United States have been infused repeatedly with moral panics and anger, reflecting state economic and social failure⁹ that taps into the fears, anxieties, and fantasies of a broad range of people. Some argue that these panics are explicitly used to achieve political hegemony.¹⁰ Sex education has been systematically destabilized in the United States through moral panics.

Sexual panics in advanced welfare capitalism evoke strange, lurid, and disgusting images that merge media and popular reactions “below the surface of civil society,”¹¹ targeting individuals and groups in ways that produce coherent and incoherent ideological platforms and political strategies. The conscious and unconscious resonances of this process,¹² while unknown, are necessary in understanding the emergence of theoretical formulations of moral panics since the time of the seminal 1972 work of Stanley Cohen, who coined the idea of moral panics. Panics produce state and nonstate stigma, ostracism, and social exclusion—the opposite of what liberalism or neoliberalism has envisioned.¹³ Sexual panics, when effective, are liminal and generate images of the monstrous. In media representations, especially,¹⁴ sexual panics may generate the creation of monstrous enemies—sexual scapegoats. This “othering” dehumanizes and strips individuals and whole communities of sexual and reproductive rights, exposing fault lines of structural violence (e.g., racism, poverty, homophobia, etc.).¹⁵ Of course, not all of these events are significant or efficacious. The pattern in these reactions and counterreactions hinge repeatedly on questions of normative sexual citizenship, reproductive accommodation and assimilation, or sexual orientation and gender resistance and defiance. This book examines these themes through the description and analysis of the intersection of moral panics and sexual rights globally but with particular reference to American hegemony at home and abroad.

Defining Panics

While a variety of historical and cultural studies previously examined fears, anxieties, and happenings such as witchcraft accusations and confessions, none of them did so systematically through the concept of moral panic. That awaited the 1972 work of British sociologist Stanley Cohen in his book Folk Devils and Moral Panics. Cohen argues that “societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic. A condition, episode, person, or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests.”¹⁶ Cohen’s study was an effort to understand youth subcultures, delinquency, and police control, and he strongly suggested that media were responsible for panics. Cohen’s work did not explicitly concern sexuality, though sexuality was later linked to it in the critiques of Cohen’s work by Jeffrey Weeks (1981), Gayle Rubin (1984), and Simon Watney (1987). Cohen’s concepts have been critiqued in detail by British academics, including Charles Critcher¹⁷ who looked at the media’s role in causing panics; by Watney¹⁸ who studied pornography, AIDS, and sexuality; and by Stuart Hall and his colleagues (1978), who theoretically explored the role of hegemony and police control in the forces that create panics. Angela McRobbie and Sarah Thornton (1995), as noted below, provide significant clarification of the limitations of the concept: that it has often been employed more as a label, thus impeding analysis. In this book we are especially concerned with clarifying the conditions under which moral panics are created at certain times and places and not at others; why certain audiences are more susceptible to the lure of moral panics in the media and others are not; and who gains or benefits from these panics and who is harmed. In other words, we wish to explore the limitations of the ideas in history and culture.

Thirty years after his first book, Cohen¹⁹ reflected that his work “belongs to the distinctive voice of the late Sixties,” because it explored anxieties about youth deviance, delinquency, and drugs. Cohen did comment on sexual child abuse scandals and terrible mob reactions to sexual predators in England, but otherwise, sexuality still was not a focus.

Here we need a sharper and somewhat more refined vocabulary to distinguish the social forms to be discussed in this book. Among these, I wish to contrast the following:

1) Moral shock. Moral shock is defined as a socially significant incident or threat that galvanizes public outrage²⁰ and that is commonly associated with “the idiom of disgust.” As an example, Janice Irvine points to the Christian Right using outrage in opposing gay school reform, as in the controversies surrounding gay-straight alliances in high schools.²¹

2) Great fear. This is a term used by John Gagnon (2005) that has some of the connotations of moral shock but is extended over longer periods of time and is at a heightened level of anxiety and worry. Great fear can take either a sexual or nonsexual focus. As with the great fear of masturbation in the 18th and 19th centuries,²² there were decades of worry that led to a subsequent “panic” without any necessary social changes to the state apparatus. Nevertheless, great fears can alter—even overhaul—and impact our cultural meaning systems and scripts, as we shall see.

3) Moral campaigns. Whether focused on sexual matters such as “purity” or sex education, temperance, or women’s emancipation, moral campaigns are defined by strong moral and ethical sentiments and ideologies necessary for changing the way values are organized. Moral campaigns try to implement organizational transformation but though entirely through nonstate mechanisms.²³ Joseph Gusfield (1986) has similarly written of “symbolic crusades” in arenas such as the temperance movement, exploring how social class, domination, conflict, mobility, and reform all conditioned reactions to moral campaigns as they destabilized public status. It is notable that many examples of anti–sex education fundamen...