What happens to little boys...

For weeks, I couldn't get through the phone to Singnet, an internet service provider. I sent an e-message to their Help, but never got any reply. Grgggghh! So that day when I was in the vicinity of Somerset Road, I decided to go personally to their Service Counter and impose myself on them.

While seated at the Service Counter, waiting for the officer to find a satisfactory answer for me, I observed mother and son at the adjoining Service Desk applying for an internet account.

Son was about 14 or 15, you know, the type who have benefitted from good nutrition all their lives, clear skin, preppy haircut, just beginning to flesh out. Big bright eyes, kisser lips. Give him a year or two more, and he'll be devastating for those among us who like 'em young. But he was still 14 or 15, in my opinion. To the service officer's questions, he answered, "Yes, sir," and "No, sir." 16 or 17 year-olds, on the other hand, tend to think they are equal to adults.

But it was clearly going to be the son's account, not the mother's. He had apparently decided on the user-id he would prefer. The clincher was when the service officer asked them whether they had a Mac, Windows 3.1 or Windows 95, the mother answered, "Oh, I think it's called Compaq."

"Mom, that's only a brand name," he interjected, and turning to the officer, "Win 95, sir," a wee bit embarrassed about his mother.

To protect our young from internet smut, parents are encouraged to install screening software like NetNanny. Can you imagine this mother -- and I'm sure she's not untypical -- installing NetNanny? She wouldn't know which screwdriver to use!

So parents have to rely on the community or the State to fill in where they cannot. This demand for some kind of control over material on the internet of course runs up against free speech purists, and is one of the biggest issues today. A lot of newsprint and airtime is expended on the arguments this way and that, and on the efficacy of the suggested methods of control. I am not going into that here. Suffice it to say that I am not a believer in black and white. There is a case for policing. If teenagers venture out on their bikes, and parents cannot follow them every minute of the day, we rightly expect the community to provide a minimum safety in the public space.

Instead, what I am going to tickle you with is the thought: why sex? If media, be it the internet, film, magazines, or TV, have to have standards for young viewers, why is so much of the contention over sex?

Violence is another, no doubt, but it strikes me how minimal the controls on violence are. And such minimal -- I would say, inadequate -- controls seem quite satisfactory to parents. Only the grossest depictions of mutilated bodies, or the actual act of stabbing, are considered too foul. Some "macho" guy insanely going down a street, semi-automatic blazing away, (all in the name of saving civilisation), or gang warfare, or rape and kidnap, why, that's par for the course. "Kids are quite capable of distinguishing fact from fiction", they say. "They do have a sense of what's ultimately right or wrong."

Sex is more insidious.

Of course, so is smoking. But people smoke all the time when seen in the media. No howls of protest that it lowers children's threshold to picking up a lifelong addiction.

And so are the racial slurs and misrepresentations in media. While there are protests when particularly egregious examples surface, there is no fervent call for blanket bans. And mind you, racial hate has probably caused the loss of more lives this century then any other motive.

The focus is always on sex. Why?

Well, there isn't a good Why, except that it comes from a Judaeo-Christian complex about it. This cultural strand, which has snuck into many other cultures, attaches a lot of shame, guilt and condemnation to sex. Not only sex, to nudity too. It makes a big heaven-and-hell thing about sexual fidelity; it asserts a connection between pure love, whatever that is, and piety. It even has a parable about the loss of innocence in the Garden of Eden, with Adam and Eve suddenly realising that they were naked, and feeling ashamed about it. Its descendent cultures elevate circumcision to the status of rites.

There is this idea that sex leads people astray, lust a sure route to damnation. Therefore, to protect young minds, they should not be exposed to sex. By now, my reader is thinking, what crap!

Exactly, my dear. What makes us think that seeing sex around them has a deleterious effect on children? Where is the evidence? To put it more bluntly, does anyone know, does anyone REALLY know, what happens to little boys when they see daddy "wrestling" with mommy? Would it really be the end of the world?

© Yawning Bread 

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