| February 2004
Porn, panic and pandemonium
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On page 7 of the Straits Times today (Wed, 11 Feb 2004) was a short
news article about a new leader for the Chechen rebels. The story
(originally from the Associated Press) described him as a “Saudi-born warrior so zealously Muslim
that he is traumatized just by touching non-believers.”
What an arresting description of the man! But is this just hyperbole or are there really such people on this earth?
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Then I turned to page H8, read the story “Police probe porn VCD find in school”, and saw more of them! But hold on, let’s get a few details together first. As gathered from the Straits Times and the New Paper [1], what transpired was this: On Tuesday, 3 February, a schoolteacher glimpsed a 14-year-old boy retrieving a pornographic VCD that had fallen out from his book, and trying to hide it. Two more VCDs were discovered soon after. The school (which later I found out was Kent Ridge Secondary School) did some sort of investigation in the following days, but on Monday morning soon after school began, the boy concerned and 16 of his friends were summoned to the school office and told to wait in the corridor. They were to write an account of their involvement in the matter. For the next seven hours, they were kept there without food or water despite the hot sun burning into the area where they were confined. A press reporter noted that at least one boy looked slightly sunburnt by the time she arrived at the scene in the afternoon. And was it a chaotic scene! The parents had been notified only around 2 pm. They hurried to the school furious at their sons, but then on seeing how the boys had been treated, became even more furious at the teachers. “None of us knew they were taken in at 8am. But I rushed down as soon as they called me at 2pm. I was so angry that my boy and his friends were being treated like criminals,” said Mr A J, a parent who bought food and drink for all the students at 3.40 pm. One boy, who suffered from Hirschsprung's Disease [2], was in pain and had to be rushed to hospital. The mother said she had notified the school on several occasions that her son had this condition, but the school denied knowing about it. Why didn’t the teachers think of allowing food and water to the boys for all 7 hours? “An oversight on our part,” said the principal, Ms Chamb Cherk Ing. The police were also called on Monday. Why were they not notified earlier? The principal said they themselves had “been investigating as best as we [could] ….Today, we decided that we needed to call the police in for guidance and help.” The parents, upset enough that they had not been told earlier, were even more upset that the school called the police. A sober description of the principals’ and teachers’ actions would be that they “over-reacted”. And no doubt we’re going to hear this term again and again until the incident is minimized. It actually tells you nothing, for it’s just a description of the events distilled into one word. The more interesting question is, what can account for the way they acted? Here was a simple disciplinary problem for which the commonsensical response should be obvious to all commonsensical people: the teacher, consulting with the principal, should have notified the first boy’s parents and asked the parents to kindly deal with it. It should have been solved by the same afternoon. But no, the problem simmered for days. The school interviewed the first boy, then his friends, to see how far the “cancer” had spread. And I say “cancer”, because only if viewed in such threatening and invasive light, would it have explained how the whole thing turned into an inquisition by Monday. It wasn’t an over-reaction. It was a case of moral panic.
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Only moral panic brings about the suspension of humanity necessary to keep 17 boys in the hot sun for hours, without food and drink. “Oversight” - the principal’s excuse -- is something that happens when you scribble a note about an appointment on a scrap of paper and then leave it at the bottom of the tray. Oversight cannot happen when 16 boys are within sight, just beyond the school office door. When you can see them, yet mentally remove them from your conscience and responsibility as a human being, then you have parted ways with the rational. Thus panic. And over what? Some porn VCDs, available from any streetside pedlar at $10 a flick. How many schoolboys have ways and means to watch porn? Let me make a guess: the vast majority! It’s part of growing up. It’s part of one’s developing sexuality, part of the process of learning to take risks, and yes, part of the process by which males learn to bond with each other. Those of us who have watched porn will tell you they’re boring. The storyline is usually thinner than Kleenex; the scenes and fornication positions predictable. The action is basically of just three or four kinds, mechanical and repetitive, and mind-numbingly stretched to fill the 90 required minutes. They are not just boring; they are stupefyingly boring. (And then you up the thrill level and watch live sex, and that too, you soon discover, is equally boring!) Give people enough opportunities to get porn, and at some point when they’re adult, the novelty will wear off. But teenagers will go through a phase when hormonal surges and their natural human curiosity (something we should always celebrate) will mean they will want to find out about sex. Add in its taboo value and it becomes irresistible. And then the theory says, they will get addicted, and their capacity to love will get all twisted. The truth is, they will, almost to a man, grow up well-adjusted and sane. Rather, we should wonder if it might be the opposite of the theory:
that it is those who believe that sex is dirty who will get all twisted in
their priorities, and who will feel so traumatized at the mere sight of
porn that they will erupt in the kind of the insanity that is moral panic. © Yawning Bread
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Footnotes
Addenda None
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