Looking for boundaries: there is gross sexual confusion in our society, as illustrated by the Michael Jackson case

IF you put "Michael Jackson trial" into an Internet search engine, you get links to approximately 5,110,000 web pages. If you put in "Mao Zedong," you get about 509,000; "Lenin" comes up with 2,770,000. Thus the trial of a show-business celebrity appears to interest the world more than the lives and careers of the two framers of the most disastrous revolutions in world history.

The case is a surpassingly sordid one, of course, and the accused bizarre beyond belief. His celebrity and wealth have allowed him to indulge his whims to such an extent that the most egotistical Roman emperors, by comparison, seem models of psychological stability. And whether innocent or guilty, Michael Jackson is certainly the Nero of kitsch.

That does not mean, however, that the family of his accuser is a model of bourgeois propriety. At the very least, entrusting a minor to the care of a man of Mr. Jackson's reputation would seem a serious error of judgment, and raises questions as to the motives of those who would make such an error. But whatever the eventual outcome of the trial, the case will be of considerable interest to social historians seeking, a hundred years hence, to understand the psyche of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Those future historians (assuming that an interest in the past survives) will be struck, I suspect, by the confusion in our society concerning sexual boundaries. On one hand, almost no sexual display is forbidden, and the most casual of liaisons is perfectly normal; on the other, university professors dare not be alone in a closed room with a female student for fear of accusations of sexual misdemeanor, and in some offices the most mildly flirtatious of remarks is taken as little short of rape. Extreme licentiousness thus coexists with a Puritanism that out-Calvins Calvin. One minute we are told that anything goes, and the next that we must carefully censor ourselves for fear of permanently traumatizing anyone who might overhear supposedly salacious remarks. At last, Herbert Marcuse's concept of repressive tolerance seems to make some sense: We can do what we like so long as we live in fear.

This is not our only confusion about sexual boundaries, of course. Our society is extremely condemnatory of the crimes of which Jackson is accused--he faces a prison sentence of 20 years, far more than he'd get for many other offenses--and yet it sexualizes children earlier and earlier in their lives, with sex education starting almost before they know anything else. Part of this education entails the ethical proposition that no sexual activity between consenting people is wrong or to be condemned, and we bombard children with materials that suggest that a lack of sexual experience by the age of twelve is a failure and a failing; and yet we affect to believe also that premature sexual activity has a permanently adverse effect, being ultimately responsible for all sorts of mal-adaptations and miseries later in life.

In Britain, the only operation on a child under 16 that a parent does not have the right to be consulted or notified about is abortion. Under new legislation, parents can be made responsible for the crimes and misdemeanors of their children, and if the child persistently truants from school, the parents (or, more usually, the single parent) can be sent to prison. Yet a doctor is virtually prohibited from informing the parents if he prescribes oral contraceptives to their daughter when she is 14 years old. Only the sexual behavior of their children is not within the responsibility of parents; and, oddly enough, confidential prescribing of contraceptives has done nothing to reduce the rate of teenage pregnancy in Britain--quite the contrary.

At the same time, sexual relations under the age of 16 remain a criminal offense. In other words, British doctors not only do, but must, as a matter of professional principle, conspire in what the law still considers sexual crime. Since it is an undoubted fact, and no doubt part of the problem, that children mature sexually much earlier than they once did--the age of puberty has declined by about a year every decade for several decades--there could, I suppose, be a rational case for reducing the age of consent, but no one makes it for fear of being labeled a pedophile. Instead, parents, like doctors, connive at the commission of sexual offenses. Whenever I have seen men imprisoned for having sexual relations with a girl under the age of consent, I have discovered that, de facto, they are being punished not for having sex with such a girl, but for refusing to continue to have sex with her. She or her parents then (and only then) report to the police, not as a matter of principle but of revenge, the law in such cases being used as nothing but an instrument to obtain a satisfactory end to a lovers' tiff, or what theorists of narrative are inclined to call "closure."

There is, in fact, a deep-seated problem about not only sexual but all behavioral boundaries in modern societies. While most of us who think about such matters at all accept that boundaries are socially desirable or necessary, we also demand that they be rational, that is to say have a justification derived from the very constitution of things. Unfortunately, nature does not often oblige with such boundaries: Continua are more common in nature than discrete breaks.