Judith Levine

Judith Levine (born 1952) is an American author, journalist, civil libertarian and co-founder of the National Writers Union, a trade union of contract and freelance writers, and No More Nice Girls, a group dedicated to promoting abortion rights through street theater. She is a board member of the National Center for Reason and Justice and the Vermont chapter of the ACLU.


 * See also:
 * Harmful to Minors (2002)

Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex (2002)

 * Forward by Joycelyn Elders, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, ISBN 0816640068
 * The idea that sex is a normative- and, heaven forbid, positive- part of adolescent life is unutterable in America's public forum. "There is a mainstream sex ed and there is right-wing sex ed," said Leslie Kantor in 1997, when she was traveling the nation in her work for SIECUS. "But there is no left-wing sex education in America." She included her own organization in that characterization. Just fifteen years after Joyce Purnick's newspaper denounced the idea of chastity as antediluvian, the New York Times columnist felt compelled to insert a caveat into her critique of the new abstinence-only regulations. "Obviously," she began, "nobody from the Christian right to the liberal left objects to... encouraging sexual abstinence." There are two problems with this consensus. First, around the globe, most people begin to engage in sexual intercourse or its equivalent homosexual intimacies during their teen years. And second, there is no evidence that lessons in abstinence, either alone or accompanied by a fuller complement of sexuality and health information, actually hold teens off from sexual intercourse for more than a matter of months.
 * p. 93


 * Abstinence-only education is not practical. It is ideological.
 * p. 94

Quotes about Levine

 * Judith Levine is a journalist, essayist, and author who has written about sex, gender, and families for two decades. Her articles appear regularly in national publications, most recently Mrs., nerve.com, and My Generation. An activist for free speech and sex education, Levine is a founder of the feminist group No More Nice Girls and the National Writers Union. She is the author of My Enemy, My Love: Women, Men, and the Dilemmas of Gender, and lives in Brooklyn, New York, and Hardwick, Vermont.
 * On the back flap of the 2002 hardcover edition of Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex (2002), Judith Levine, forward by Joycelyn Elders, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, ISBN 0816640068