May 28th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
Very Good Question
In all the hysterical hand flapping of “somebody think of the children!”, nobody really sits down and says: “Well, what is it that we don’t want kids to learn or do when it comes to sex?”
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Shorter URL for sharing: https://www.erosblog.com/?p=6922
Shorter URL for sharing: https://www.erosblog.com/?p=6922
So so true. I love this blog by the way. I found it the other day when I had some pornographic dreams, or rather dreams of me searching for and finding some really good pornography in a blog type format, so I woke up, and went to google searching for sex blogs. Of course, I didn’t find anything nearly as good as in my dreams, but this has certainly opened up a whole new world for me; one where people are open minded about such things.
Also, thanks to your blog I was able to find some good pro-sex/porn feminist activism blogs.
The sad, serious answer is that most defenders of The Children find the notion of people under 18 knowing anything at all about sex to be profoundly distasteful–at best, a necessary evil.
My own suspicion is that the model actually at work in their logic is that ‘proper’ sexuality will emerge naturally without any of that nasty education stuff.
A very good question, indeed.
The problem is that children don’t learn what they actually need to know about sex, and then make stupid mistakes later on in life; or they never become comfortable with their bodies when they are sexually mature.
After reading the rest of the article, I couldn’t help but wonder about why we are indeed so uptight in America about sex.
We don’t seem concerned enough about the effects of Rambo-type movies, or the example set by our military, depicting the belief that if someone has a social or economic philosophy that differs from one’s own, the appropriate response is to grab a weapon and snuff out their life; or if that fails, destroy as much of their property as you can.
If we can expect our children’s all-around socializing to balance out their ideas on killing and destruction, why can’t we trust them to handle “porn”?
The answer probably has more to do with society’s failure to embrace erotica and talk more openly about sexual matters.
Yes! Dr Whiplash just said exactly what I was thinking. Why are we so lax with exposing kids to violence that we know leads to harmful things, and not to sexuality that is relatively benign and natural?
Actually, we don’t really know that exposure to filmed violence leads to harmful things, any more than we know that exposure to filmed sexuality leads to harmful things. The data just don’t show either to have any significant negative effect.
Sorry Dave, the data shows that kids with violence problems tend to act out more when they’ve been exposed to violent media. But that group isn’t that big, so if you’re talking about All kids, the effect isn’t that significant, but if you’re talking about the kids who already have problems in that area, it’s going to affect them. What I would say though, is that rather than banning violent media for the sake of those kids, we should work on reducing their numbers, as a kid might see a certain violent movie/game once, but if they’ve got a problem with anger, it’s going to last them a lifetime
Both of you: please don’t make data-based arguments without supporting links. It comes across as empty noise and arm waving.
The pre-eminent economic and military power on the planet, little or no restrictions on public displays of violence but an incredibly repressive attitude to sexuality in public masking a wide variety of tastes in sexual mores and interests in private. While one could be referring to the present day US of A, it also refers to Victorian England (public hangings and all). It took the Brits a fair bit of time to get over the whole puritanical mindset – and not until the Pax Britannica had long fallen by the wayside. Given the current state of the ‘Pax Americana’ (which never really reached the same level of hegemony) it’s probably a few years yet before the level of acceptable violence drops and sexual attitudes relax a little. Of course, given the polarized nature of politics in the US, the current state might be the logical ‘hard-over the other way’ response to the 60’s (just took a while)
@ Dave:
The difference is that violence in itself is a harmful thing, whereas sexuality is not. Quite the contrary actually.
But the answer to the question: “Well, what is it that we don’t want kids to learn or do when it comes to sex?” is pretty straight forward: All the thing things we do! But then again we wouldn’t share that with our neighbor either.
Maybe it’s not that we don’t want them to learn, as much as we certainly don’t want to know WHAT they learned and HOW they found out. We want to know just as little about our kids sexuality as we want them to know about ours. We love grandchildren, we just don’t want to know how they where made…