It’s the same stuff
Posted on Sunday, February 12, 2006
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Editorial/145656/
Alocal TV news report last week explained how the new technology available to kids nowadays has the potential to put them in touch with pornographic images, videos and other material.
The reporter said the increasing prevalence of electronic devices makes it imperative that concerned parents maintain a vigilant eye and control over their children’s iPods and other portable audio and video players.
Without such scrutiny, parents risk the danger that their children’s minds, at the most impressionable stages, could be infiltrated by images and impressions that could encourage potentially dangerous behavior.
There’s no doubt in my mind, based on all the media programming and lucrative TV commercials I’ve witnessed in the past decade, that a full-court press is on in our culture to sexualize our youth at the earliest possible age. After all, sex sells, doesn’t it ?
The only solution the reporter offered to slow the agenda is for parents to actually function as parents in preserving their children’s innocence, at least until they can reach the age of reason and good choices.
Ironic, isn’t it, that when it comes to video equipment capable of projecting such images and thoughts into a child’s mind, the remedy is parental control ? Yet at the same time, public school libraries in Fayetteville and elsewhere say parents need not know their children might be reading basically the same sexually titillating materials at our tax-supported schools.
In fact, Arkansas law actually prohibits parents from obtaining information about which books their children read or check out from a public school library without the children’s “informed, written consent.” Anyone else think that needs reform ?
Some of the same explicitly sexual materials that encourage “fun” techniques for engaging in oral sex, group sex and sadomasochism that some local public school library book reviewers have said contain “valuable” information for girls as young as 12 to know is displayed on the very iPod contents that parents are now being advised to question.
One book available to some junior high students flatly proclaims that “sexual preference is a continuum... not... a question of being gay or straight.... People move around on this continuum over time. Sexuality is constantly evolving—one of its many joys.” It also promotes Internet sex sites that any rational adult, especially a parent, would view as lewd and obscene.
This particular book, called “Deal With It : A whole new approach to your body, brain and life as a gURL,” currently is available to kids in the Woodland Junior High School Library, the Fayetteville High School and across Washington County under the E-Library program.
I don’t know if the school libraries make available R- or even X-rated videos for iPods or DVD players that visually demonstrate how to perform all the sexual acts mentioned in the book. But what’s the difference when it comes right down to it ? Perhaps someone can explain to me the difference in results between placing this garbage in children’s naturally curious minds via electronic devices and reading words and pictures about the same sex acts in a book. Isn’t it all being fed into the same malleable repository ? And why is it that we go to such great lengths and expense to identify graphic sexual content in TV programs, Hollywood films, video games and music CDs specifically so children will not be exposed to this potentially devastating stuff too soon, yet we don’t do the same with written materials such as books that can potentially have the same impact ? Should parents not be informed if a particular book their child is reading contains materials that would be classified as X-rated if it were on a video they were watching ? Many, many books written specifically for adults are made into films that wind up being R-rated, right ? No, I do not believe in banning or censoring books. But I definitely believe that when it comes to our children, the next generation of Americans, parents have a right to know, as well as a unique responsibility to provide loving direction, when it comes to mentoring the timing and nature of their children’s exposure to the most powerful (and increasingly exploited ) force on the planet.
—–––––•–––––—Staff columnist Mike Masterson is the former editor of three Arkansas daily newspapers.