Lara Riscol

Alas, less than a month after the festivities, sex looms once again as a spoiler — after the fact — of the Miss America proceedings; but this time it is not the revelation of wanton ways that has created headaches for contest officials, it is the queen’s abrupt shift from a platform against youth violence to a campaign for sexual abstinence that threatens to disrupt the event’s smooth transition from tawdry bikini fest to a bare-midriff college bowl.

It all began when Harold, shortly after receiving her tiara, announced at a press conference her intention to publicly advocate chastity before marriage. This was a pet topic, Harold told reporters, and she had every hope of speaking of it often and officially, despite perceived resistance from Miss America organizers. The implication that Harold had somehow been warned away from sex talk, albeit anti-sex talk, fired up the Washington Times, which immediately ran an article titled “Miss America told to zip it on chastity talk.” Harold’s ardent supporters in the abstinence movement went to other media brimming with indignation.

“In an age where beauty queens are regularly disqualified for inappropriate behavior, who would have thought a virtuous one would be silenced for her virtue?” said Concerned Women for America President Sandy Rios in a press release. “This is blatant censorship that betrays a hidden agenda of political correctness and religious bigotry among pageant officials.”

The Times and press releases from family values groups further suggested that pageant officials demonstrated a clear liberal bias when they allowed Miss America 1998 Kate Shindle, whose platform was HIV prevention, to advocate condom distribution and needle exchange during her reign.

Media outlets from the Austin American Statesman to People magazine ran with the story, saying pageant officials tried to silence Harold’s pro-chastity opinions, and that the brainy beauty queen refused to be “bullied.” Already elevated to heroine status in abstinence-only circles, Miss America was quickly embraced by the Bush administration’s conservative ranks, many of whom met with her in Washington to discuss her platform. And 38 members of Congress immediately sent Harold a letter encouraging her to “stand up for your beliefs and promote the healthy message of abstinence until marriage.”

Finally, as controversy threatened to overtake all positive spin, Miss America officials warmed to Harold’s abstinence stance, a change of heart, according to Focus on the Family and Family Research Council, inspired by the demand of angry conservatives to loosen the new queen’s “muzzle.”

Miss America’s interim CEO George Bauer has been unavailable for comment, as has Erika Harold. But in an Oct. 9 press release, the new Miss America said that she had thought she wouldn’t be able to talk about abstinence in an official capacity, but after her press conference, she met with contest officials and “clarified the role abstinence will play in the advocacy of my platform.” Youth violence prevention would still be part of her platform, said Harold, but, she added, “I will be speaking this year about abstinence in all forms — including abstaining from drugs, alcohol and sex …”

In an interview with her hometown paper, the News-Gazette, the Urbana native went a bit further, saying, “It was always my intention to incorporate some form of abstinence education into my youth-violence platform. I never desired to be subversive or to have a double platform. It baffled me that there was a controversy about it.”

Perhaps doubly baffled are those who see the platform switch as controversial, if not downright sneaky. “When I went to bed, it was youth violence and I breathed a huge sigh of relief,” said Susan Wilson, executive coordinator for Rutgers University Network for Family Life Education, advocates of comprehensive sexuality education. “I think the judges should take her crown away for lying. What a role model.”

But according to Carol Radtke, president of the board for the Miss Illinois scholarship program, all local contestants understand that youth violence prevention is the state’s official platform in the Miss America competition. They can weave into their own personal cause, she said, should they win the state pageant. “Erika was encouraged, for the youth of the United States and internationally,” said Radtke, “to work with the big picture of youth against violence, and to draw upon her own personal experience of bullying and harassment.”

Harold responded to the “encouragement” by sticking to the subject of youth violence during the national pageant and immediately after, when she flew to Brussels for the launch of the World Health Organization’s Report on Violence and Health, and garnered the support of several other social and political advocacy groups, including the Anti-Defamation League and the National Center for Victims of Crime. She repeated a litany of heartbreaking stories about the racial and sexual harassment she suffered in the ninth grade, a brutal time in which she said she was called a whore and a slut, and discovered that kids were pooling lunch money to buy a rifle to kill her.

Incredibly, Harold had never publicly spoken of this torment before taking on the youth violence platform as Miss Illinois. Libby Gray, one of Harold’s mentors at Chicago-based Project Reality, an abstinence-only group that trains beauty contestants to advocate premarital chastity, says of Harold’s torment: “I’ve known her for four years and I didn’t know about it.”

Harold, Gray said, has since explained that she wasn’t “emotionally ready to talk about her bullying history” prior to winning Miss Illinois. And also, Gray said, “the state people gave Erika the impression that it wouldn’t be savvy to mention abstinence (at the national pageant).”

Even more likely is the possibility that Harold believed staying mum on chastity would help her win. “We had conversations too,” Gray said, “and she felt it wouldn’t be prudent for her to talk about it.”

That prudence, Gray suggested, was grounded not just in the coaching of state handlers, but in the conventional wisdom of abstinence activists. Gray produced as evidence an article posted online two years ago by conservative World Magazine accusing “liberal cultural forces” of pressuring beauty queen contestants to “abstain from having abstinence platforms.”

The story quotes one such contestant, Brooke Buie, who allegedly couldn’t advance with her platform “Sexual Abstinence and Self-Worth.” So she took the “sheep in wolf’s clothing” approach to win Miss Texas runner-up with the broader platform of “Aids Awareness.”

“You just have to decide what your goal is,” Buie told World. “Do you want to stick to sexual abstinence no matter what? Or do you want to get as high up as you can so that you can have a national platform to say what you want once you have the title?”

As Miss America, Harold has repeated her stories about racial and sexual harassment, recently adding that a school principal responded to her request for help during the bullying by saying, “If you’d only be more submissive like the other girls, this wouldn’t happen to you.”

Harold and her father have said that she will continue to talk in generalities about the harassment, but will not name names. Gray, meanwhile, explains that for Harold, abstinence was such a positive thing, “a great choice that empowered her as a young woman,” that she naturally chose abstinence over violence as her pageant cause.

Certainly Gray, and others on the frontlines of America’s abstinence-only movement, have not been surprised by Harold’s passion for the chastity cause, which she has promoted throughout her pageant career as a contestant and as a spokeswoman for Project Reality. Funded primarily by the Illinois Department of Human Services, Project Reality adheres to such teaching principles as “sex outside of marriage can cause physical or psychological harm.” Contraceptives cannot be mentioned except to discuss failure rates.

In her written testimony for Welfare Reform’s reauthorization of more abstinence funding, Harold wrote of being accepted and receiving awards for speaking out about sexual abstinence. “This was recognition that not only is the abstinence movement an important new sexual revolution,” she said, “but it is also a movement that my generation must lead.”

In a 1999 Eagle Forum Education Reporter article, Project Reality director Kathleen Sullivan called Harold and another beauty queen “the wave of the future” and “role models … emerging at the start of the new millennium who may spark a new type of sexual revolution.” Continued Sullivan, “The fact that these lovely, confident young women not only know the importance of reserving the marital act until marriage, but were willing to make abstinence their platform in the Miss Illinois Pageant, is very refreshing.”

A letter of recommendation from Project Reality for Miss America’s Community Service Award further documents Harold’s longtime involvement in the pro-abstinence movement.

“For the past three years, Erika has served as a field representative for Project Reality, a national organization promoting adolescent health through abstinence education,” wrote director Sullivan. The letter outlines Harold’s achievements with Project Reality, including speaking to more than 14,000 young people, meeting with more than 100 legislative offices, and submitting written testimony to pass the House bill for more abstinence funding through Welfare Reform reauthorization.

However, the letter speaks of general abstinence from “risky behaviors” and mentions sex only once. “Although Erika’s platform has been centered on the message of sexual abstinence,” says the letter, “Erika’s presentations touch upon other issues pertinent to youth, such as violence prevention and bullying.”

Harold, who as Miss America 2003, will travel 20,000 miles each month to advocate her social cause, seems to have embraced this strategy not just to win the coveted tiara, but to eventually attain public office. Immediately after September’s pageant, in a National Review piece called “The ‘Right’ Miss America,” conservative columnist Joel Mowbray wrote, “Ironically, Harold thought of quitting pageant life a year ago, convinced that judges would never crown an outspoken conservative as Miss Illinois. She told me two months before the state pageant that she strongly doubted she would win the state title, let alone the national one.”

Mowbray goes on to comment on Harold switching to a youth violence platform for the national contest, saying “here’s why Harold will shine as a politician: She is cunning enough to know that you can’t talk to teens about violence without discussing the risk factors that contribute to dangerous behavior: drugs, alcohol — and teen sex.”

Harold has made clear her political ambitions. Staunchly opposed to abortion, even in cases of rape and incest, she has said she will probably run as a Republican for governor or for the Senate, and ultimately for president. Her Miss America bio says she plans to work with the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on her platform.

After her National Press Club appearance earlier this month, Miss America met with Attorney General John Ashcroft, Surgeon General Richard Carmona and Education Secretary Rod Paige. The Department of Education’s press office said an aide who attended most of the meeting didn’t hear “talk of abstinence” while there, that Harold and Paige discussed bullying and harassment prevention efforts in America’s schools. However, reports indicate chastity will slip into policy discussions in time.

Bob Harold, Erika’s father, told the News-Gazette before last week’s public spat that his daughter “had to take on the new platform [of youth violence],” but that she would “eventually integrate both issues.”

Erika, in her interview with the News-Gazette, suggests the priority of her two passions. “Sometimes you take flak for what you say, but if you really want to see teen pregnancy rates decline and violence decrease you have to stand up for what you believe in,” she said.

To the Daily Illinois, she called Miss America, “a job opportunity of a lifetime … to get the opportunity to travel around the world and speak to young people about issues that are important, and to be able to talk to policy makers in terms of making decisions that are really going to impact lives of young people.”

Immediately after her Miss America win, Harold reportedly began organizing the other beauty queens to advocate sexual abstinence. Before that, according to the letter of recommendation from Project Reality, Harold helped Project Reality “connect with over 20 pageant titleholders from across the country who have advocated a similar platform [sexual abstinence].”

In fact, Harold and 11 other beauty queens went to Capitol Hill in April to push for more abstinence-only funding and, according to the Family Research Council, to participate in a weekend “boot camp” on politics, lobbying and media training. According to Project Reality, the crowned virgins ultimately were instrumental in helping pass welfare reform reauthorization of more abstinence-only funds, which came after the defeat of two amendments calling for abstinence programs to include medically accurate information and for state flexibility with abstinence curriculum.

Opposition to the measure increasing abstinence-only funds has come from nearly 100 youth, health and civil rights groups who signed a letter to President Bush asking him to reconsider abstinence-only funding. The emergence of Miss America as a glittering symbol for premarital chastity is a setback for these activists.

Tamara Kreinin, president of Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States said, “Bottom line, we respect anyone’s choices for their own lives. But it’s cause for concern when someone with a lot of notoriety, especially with young people, advocates a position that can cause harm to their health and well-being.”

Adds Wilson of Rutgers University Network for Family Life Education, which publishes the popular Sex, Etc. Web site for teens, “The chance to give all young people the opportunity to be responsible goes out of the window when Miss America starts using her own personal choice as the yardstick for sexual behavior for every teen in the United States.”

Laurel Martinez, 20, a volunteer for Scarleteen, a Web site founded to counter the abstinence-only movement by providing comprehensive sexual health education, and which includes moderated message boards, said Harold’s stance on abstinence “is not only unrealistic and intolerant, it is dangerous.”

Adds Martinez, “At Scarleteen, we spend the majority of our time answering questions that could easily be addressed in a comprehensive sexuality curriculum. Due to lack of funding for any program which is not abstinence-based, teens are not being taught even the fundamentals of taking care of themselves.”

James Wagoner, director of Advocates for Youth, which supports a more comprehensive Family Life Education Act still in the House, hopes that research, and the support of education and health professionals, will overcome the effects of Erika Harold’s polished politicking.

“America’s leading scientific body, the Institute of Medicine, has called abstinence-only programs ‘poor fiscal and public health policy,’” he said. “With all due respect to the current Miss America, I think that statement carries more weight than her personal views when it comes to how we should address the 10,000 cases of sexually transmitted disease, the 2,400 pregnancies, and the 55 new cases of HIV infection which occur among teens in the U.S. each and every day.”

At this point, it hardly matters just how much the Miss America judges knew about Harold’s primary political passion or whether they attempted to silence her. Harold is America’s beauty queen, a bright, beautiful and poised 22-year-old who will use her position to promote abstinence unless married — most likely with the help of like-minded politicos such as Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson. And if she is as successful with her bid for office as she was in her reach for the tiara, Harold, an unabashed Christian conservative and perhaps the most famous virgin since Britney Spears, just might become president one day, not just queen of the new sexual revolution.

To protect the victim’s privacy, Urban’s editors decided not to run his photos. Yet one shot’s gritty reality was submitted and won the domestic news (newspaper) category in the National Press Photographers Association Best of Photojournalism contest, a distinction rewarded with publication of the photo online and soon in a book.

But just what reality oozed into public light?

Clearly exposed is mob mentality as multihued hands press both breasts, and fingers jam through her panties. Some guys try to crawl over others to cop a feel. Smiley faces crane for a peek as one happy dude whips out a camcorder to preserve the special moment.

The scene has been pegged an act of violence, showing how quickly the line between civility and brutality can be tripped. Reports say the forced group-grope was one of many that festive night. But the Mardi Gras molesters cannot be dismissed as perverted monsters. They look jovial, clueless, entitled. They are the guys next door, our sons, caught up in an extreme rendering of “boys will be boys.”

I know the party line of defining sexual assault as violence, as power abuse, not sex. But tossing this mass violation into some aberrant cesspool allows us to dissociate from the perpetrators and rise above the sexual stench of our own making. Can you view this photo of clean-cut guys as they revel in mauling anonymous body parts, and not wonder: “How are we raising our boys?”

Since researching my book on America’s schizophrenic approach to sexuality, I’m often struck by how we insist on handing boys the short end of the sexual development stick. As our chastity-crusading commander in chief plunders public education and health to prove that sex without marriage causes death, disease and despair, boys receive a mere nod in the battle cry for abstinence.

In fact, the fear and shame-based abstinence-until-marriage programs funded by our tax dollars and sweeping the nation absolve boys of sexual responsibility by reinforcing tired gender roles. Boys are portrayed as slaves to their throbbing key in desperate need to unlock any warm hole. Girls are taught how and why to resist boys’ predictable predatory push. Boys will be boys, girls must be gatekeepers.

Traditionalists, evolutionary psychologists and popular culture regurgitate this “fact of human nature” as divine truth. To suggest that sex ebbs and flows along a dynamic continuum between the genders, or that man is more complex than his boner, is sacrilege. Or as Bill Maher says on “Politically Incorrect,” “a lot of nonsense.” In a recent episode, where Maher deems men are “just after pussy,” Dr. Drew Pinsky of radio’s syndicated “Loveline” claims males are sexually driven by uncontrollable urges and should not be pathologized.

“We’ve made men to feel guilty and to feel bad about who they are,” says Pinsky, “but the reality is that men do need to be contained and tamed, and we’d be sort of flinging poo if we didn’t have a social order.”

Apparently that social order dumps the self-restraint load on the female half of the species. Boys must try, girls must stop them. With all the hype about today’s promiscuous kids causing chaos and the moral decline of our nation, male sexual behavior has changed very little. Studies show that rates of sexual intercourse for boys have remained steady or declined since the good ol’ days. Current sermonizing by the right and sensationalizing by the media is really about fear of today’s jacked-up female sexuality — what’s good for the gander, we are told, is dangerous for the goose.

And kids learn our double standard well. A current study led by Indiana University School of Medicine’s Gregory D. Zimet shows that boys who initiate sex have high self-esteem, whereas girls who initiate sex have low self-esteem. Although Zimet suggests stud-slut societal dynamics at play, he tells Reuters, “Clearly, it makes little sense to try to lower the self-esteem of young adolescent boys.” He adds that “the findings do suggest that helping girls to feel more self-confidence and self-respect may help them to delay initiation of sexual intercourse.”

Great, forget teaching our boys sexual mutuality. Let’s turn back the clock and help our girls more confidently play the traditional push-and-pull game of sex. Certainly the path pounded by conservative peddlers of virginity and marriage to cure America’s social ills — everything from poverty, teenage pregnancy and crime to general depletion of decency — leads to cooling the improper sexual heat of girls.

At my first sexuality conference three years ago, I interviewed a sex therapist from the South who was surprised that the 1996 Welfare Reform Act’s funding of abstinence-only programs had stirred me into the field of sexology. “Well, if I had a daughter,” he said, “I’d want her to save it for marriage. There’s a lot of crazy shit out there these days.”

“Did you teach your two sons to save themselves for marriage?” I asked.

“Nah, I didn’t talk to them about sex,” he grinned. “They’re boys. They knew what to do.”

In my research I often meet men of all ages and backgrounds whose parents told them zero about sex. Many were slipped a Playboy or porn video as soon as their voices started changing. A surprising number had a dad who dragged them at around age 15 to a prostitute, or brothel in Las Vegas or Amsterdam, to learn to become a man.

But as long as we play the antediluvian “me virile man, you virtuous woman” script on this modern stage of equality, freedom and mass-marketed sexuality, we’ll remain clueless when wild parties go bad. Too many cherry-popping contests, frat-party trains and other gangbangs are treated as cautionary tales for immodest girls. But what about harm to the male psyche when coercive sex is shrugged off as opportune release or right of passage?

Now that I am pregnant, several childless acquaintances have been pleased to learn that I’m having a boy. “I’d probably want a boy,” they say. “Girls are more difficult. You have to worry about them getting pregnant or date raped.”

But why not worry about your son impregnating or raping someone’s daughter? Girls don’t do these things to themselves. Are the consequences less profound when you’re not part of the cleanup crew?

A psychologist and sex educator for more than 25 years, Bob Selverstone trains parents how to raise their kids to be sexually healthy adults. He often shares one study that shows when moms talk to sons and daughters about sex, both delay initiation. When dads talk to daughters, they delay. When dads talk to sons, they accelerate. The implication is that although dads want to protect the innocence of their daughters, their dominant message to sons is “go for it.”

But despite the schoolyard euphemisms of first base, second, third and home run, sex is not about scoring. Sex is most explosive when it’s about connecting, giving as much as receiving. If I don’t teach my son sexual respect and responsibility — or that sex is so much more than poking body parts and getting off — then I shouldn’t be surprised at some future Mardi Gras to see his face in a sea of other red-blooded males “seizing the moment,” as someone else’s daughter silently screams.