Brain Fertilizer

There is a perspective you get from being a parent that it is very hard for a single person to understand. It's the understanding that you have a child whose prime motivation is to learn about life. Everything is new to a child, and perspective and context make a huge difference in how incidents and information impact.

The parent, the adult, can try to give the child the proper context in which to interpret what they see and hear. But a parent cannot put the child in a box and filter everything. And the world is far more obscene, profane, and carnal than it was even just 15 years ago.

All you adults reading this, especially South Park Republicans and Deadwood Democrats, do you realize you can watch your movies with adult situations, sexuality, and foul language without it affecting you because you were more protected when you were a child. And by insisting that no one touch or regulate your entertainment on "pay" TV (which is now the default in most homes, reaching more households than broadcast TV ever did in the 70s), you are eliminating that protection for your kids.

Michelle Malkin points to an excerpt from a book by a former writer for the sex industry who finally realizes this point.

Excerpt of the excerpt:

In today's media climate, whether we want it or not, we are inundated, saturated, beaten over the head with sex. Television, our national public commons, has an ever-mounting percentage of explicit sexual content on cable, shading down to the mere leering double entrendre and snickering innuendo of broadcast sitcoms. It's difficult to find a program that doesn't reference sex. It's egregious, it's out of control, it's too much. Media, advertising art, and entertainment constantly shove images at me that I am just not interested in seeing.

The average child in America puts in a full workweek, forty hours, consuming media. That means our kids are getting a snootful of this stuff, all day every day, week in and week out.

The creators of South Park find it hypocritical that we are so concerned about children being exposed to sex and bad language but don't care about kids being exposed to violent themes in movies.

Well, that's a gross oversimplification. First, parents do object to gratuitous violence, like that in, say, Grand Theft Auto. Then people say being exposed to violence doesn't necessarily make kids violent.

In all fairness, I think there is a point there. Context does make a difference. I was a little worried when my son started watching the Power Rangers, because so many parents have expressed concern that it teaches kids to hit. But I watched it a few times with them and grew less concerned. Violence in that show is always used to help, protect, and defend; not to hurt, manipulate, or destroy. And so we actually use the Power Rangers quite a bit as object lessons in having courage and persistence in dealing with difficulties, i.e., "Okay, so you fell down on your bike. Don't you think it hurts when the White Power Ranger gets kicked in the face? But he gets up and tries again, right?" This actually is working quite well, by the way. The Power Rangers aren't lessons in violence, but in courage.

And violence can, and is portrayed in different ways. Saving Private Ryan is violent, yes. So are Jackie Chan movies. So is the movie The Magnificent Seven. But violence is portrayed differently in all three, and really not glorified as violence itself, but violence in relation to something important. Defense, protection, saving.

Sexual themes, however, are nearly universally about one thing: titillation. Sexual themes are, by definition, attempts to arouse and incite desire. There is one simple message in our Sexually-Oriented culture today, and it's not the one I want my children internalizing as a Way to Live.

I am convinced that pursuing sexual satisfaction as an end-goal itself is the antithesis of peace, happiness, and stability in life. I wish the world wasn't working so hard to drown me out when I try to teach my children that philosophy of life.