| Yawning
Bread. 7 March 2008
Sex is all around, get over it
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The merchant replied on 6 March:
Well, well, well. As can be seen from the reply, it was Mommy's boy who chose the macaroon which was on display, including the chocolate garnish of a couple in embrace. He wasn't shocked. He wanted it. 17-year-olds know a lot more about sex than today's middle-aged adults might like to think. This boy probably knows a thing or two his mother does not. And face it: A significant percentage of 17- and 18-year-olds are sexually active. The danger arises not when teenagers are aware when they ought to be unaware (and you'd be kidding yourself that teenagers are ever unaware), but when they are not fully aware, only partly so. They are going to have sex anyway, sooner or later, at a time of their choosing, not ours. If by then, they aren't properly informed about risks and protection, if they have never seen a condom, or don't know how to use one, that's when problems arise. The solution cannot be to pretend that sex isn't part of their lives, like what this mother is doing. It is foolish to live in a world of make-believe. * * * * *
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Teenagers and young adults are the biggest market for cinema. One film in particular, Juno, speaks directly to them, and has garnered rave reviews to boot. A comedy-drama about a witty teenage girl who gets pregnant by accident and who has to grow up fast as she tries to find adoptive parents for her soon-to-arrive child, Juno won a screenplay Oscar for Brook Busey, who writes under the name Diablo Cody. As quoted in the Straits Times [1], Cody hit the right note when she said, "Most teen movies are condescending towards teenagers and treat them as less intelligent than adults. In reality, they may not be as mature but many of them are more clear-headed and honest than adults." Lim Soo Hoon, are you listening?
The film having been rated NC16 by the Media Development Authority, Lim Soo Hoon's darling son will be able to watch it. Her son may also be encouraged by his schoolteachers to read newspapers as part of a broader education, which by his mother's reckoning, may be as dangerous a minefield as stepping into a bakery. From the same Straits Times story, he may have come across the mention that Oscar-winning Diablo Cody was once a stripper. Since I'm sure he is also internet-savvy, like most young men his age, he may also have searched for Cody's blog, called -– wait for it -– The Pussy Ranch, wherein she chronicled her year spent in the sex business. It began when, after graduation and a couple of dead-end office jobs in Chicago and then Minneapolis, she signed up for "amateur night" at a strip club called the Skyway Lounge. She didn't win, but having enjoyed the experience nonetheless, she quit her day job and took up stripping full-time. Cody also spent time working peep shows at Sex World, a Minneapolis adult novelty and DVD store, then at phone sex before eventually returning to stripping. She drew on her skin trade experiences for her writing, first by publishing a memoir, Candy Girl: A Year In The Life Of An Unlikely Stripper (2006), before turning to scriptwriting. And look where it has led her. Needless to say, there are people who decry such role models. "Impressionable" young people must not be exposed to the idea that sex can be fun, even less that it pays! You can rely on these folks to call for censorship. * * * * *
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I'm glad to see him gently pointing out that she was being
unbalanced.
The Bennie Cheok letter in question was this one:
Bennie Cheok's claim that "the absence of the opposite gender" would leave young viewers bewildered would only be true if parents imprisoned their children in world of disinformation. If they took the trouble to educate their children properly about diversity in the world -- and the program would serve that purpose very well -- they wouldn't be bewildered at all. As for mention of "Eastern culture", need I point out the delusional nature of such a notion? Some readers will feel that this example of the Bennie Cheok/Thio Li-Ann complaint doesn't really fit into this article about sex, since what they were grouching about related to the media representation of sexual orientation. Sex and sexual orientation are different things, after all. They would be right. However, there is a connection in the way those who rail loudest against sex tend to rail against homosexuality too, and both phobias have the same root. They see sex as dirty, vile and certainly not something that should be encouraged, a facet of our biology whose only excusable exception is when it is engaged in for the purpose of procreation. Since unmarried people, particularly teenagers, aren't supposed to procreate, they are not supposed to engage in sex. These stick-in-the-mud people would demand that youngsters should not even, as the macaroon incident showed, be exposed to the idea of sex, as represented by the condom and the kamasutra chocolate. By the same logic, different sexualities, particularly homosexuality, should similarly be proscribed since procreation is not a possible outcome of such activity. The orientation itself should be suppressed, lest it lead to the (non-procreative) activity. The problem of course is that in a world where homosexuality unavoidably exists, and where in other countries, particularly the West, it is increasingly seen as normal, it will become steadily harder to demand that no representation of it should ever cross our eyes. We're going to end up cutting bits and pieces of otherwise innocuous programs just because there's a gay character here or a pro-gay mention there. Do we want to look increasingly dysfunctional, doing that? Do we want to be part of the modern world or not? * * * * *
If homosexual orientation is enough to cause such fits, what more of homosexual eroticism? Censor! Censor, they will surely say. Yet, from now on, every time you watch David Hernandez on American Idol, you're going to be reminded of it. Here again is a program that appeals to lots of teenagers and young adults, and where one of the notable names has a sex-filled past. If he goes far in this singing contest -- he's already one of the top twelve -- he could well be a role model for others. Like Diablo Cody, Hernandez was a stripper before. For three years, until September 2007, he worked in Phoenix, Arizona, at Dick's Cabaret where he would perform lap dances, fully nude on occasion, for the club's ''mostly male'' clientele, club manager Gordy Bryan told The Associated Press. Some people wondered whether he would be booted out of the show for his "sleazy" past, but American Idol executive producer Ken Warwick set the record straight. Speaking to TVGuide.com, he said, "The truth is we’re never judgmental about what people do to earn a living. They’ve gotta put food in people’s mouths. We’ve had strippers on the show before… We’re never judgmental about people who do things like that." The show goes on. But what if in a future episode, Hernandez talks about his life as a
gay stripper? Do we in Singapore now have to censor American Idol too?
What increasingly desperate measures do we have to take to sustain a world
of make-believe? © Yawning Bread
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Footnotes
Addenda None
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Some people make a laughing stock of themselves without even knowing it. Lim
Soo Hoon is one. She wrote to the Straits Times online forum to complain
that a bakery was corrupting her 17-year-old son.
