Won't Someone Please Think Of The Children?

[tgg]

I found this very interesting essay on the site gymnophiliac.com today. It's a website written by an American 24-year-old male, but I've only come across it just recently.



Won't Someone Please Think of the Children?



(I actually wrote most of this post a while ago, but Academic Naturist, thanks to his post linked to below, deserves credit for inspiring me to pull up the draft and finish it)
I have a hypothesis, based on some observations I've made about the people around me: People lose all ability to think rationally when it comes to children.
I don't know what it is about children that creates this effect - I understand the impulse to protect them, both from an ethical and biological point of view, but that just makes it even more mind boggling how incompetent adults are at it.
Take all the very real dangers facing children that parents don't know about, downplay, or outright ignore:

• Marketing and Advertising.
  
  The average kid watches an astounding 18,000 television advertisements a year, the majority of which are for candy, junk food, fast food, or sugary breakfast cereals. Advertising is designed to manipulate values, desires, and perceived needs - and it's effective enough towards that marketers spend $70 billion dollars a year on TV commercials alone. Parents will sometimes get concerned over the content of the television programming - how many have you known to show any concern over the effect of the advertisements that accompany it?.
• Automobiles.
  
  After the first year of life, accidents become by far and away the leading cause of death under the age of 14 (and continue to be a significant cause of death throughout the teen years and the rest of your life). The vast majority of those accidents involve automobiles. We should all be scared [bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse]less any time we go anywhere near a car, but instead parents think nothing of piling kids into the car as they barrel down the highway yapping on their cell phones.
• Global Warming.
  
  It bears mentioning. These kids, we plan on them growing up one day, right? Assuming no change in life expectancy, someone born in 2007 can expect to live to see the year 2080. One would imagine that a responsible parent would seek to fix the world's problems before handing it off to their kids - instead most seem to expect these kids to solve them, at a time when they'll be far more difficult to fix. Rather, what I see is parents driving their kids all over suburbia in gas guzzling minivans and SUV's. The way people are curiously unconcerned with the impact of that behavior is disturbing, to say the least.
• Violent Media
  
  While claims about the alleged harm caused by viewing sexual media are specious at best (see below), violent media has been repeatedly shown to have at least minor ill effects.

Then there's the terrible stuff that parents do to their kids and are seemingly oblivious to:

• Obesity.
  
  About 17% of children are overweight, which has led to increasing occurrences of in Type 2 Diabetes at younger ages, as well as heart disease and other problems later in life. While some parents do put an emphasis on eating healthy, it's clear that not nearly enough do - especially given that 66% of those same adults are overweight or obese themselves.
  
  No sane parent should feed their kid McDonald's or any other fast food. Nor should they feed them pre-prepared meals from the supermarket that are chock full of preservatives. Nor should they let them drink soda, which is chock full of high fructose corn syrup (and diet soda has its own set of problems). Yet given that peddlers of these products find it profitable to market to children (see the point about TV ads above), it seems that many, many parents don't have any issue subjecting their children to this harm.

Then there's the stuff we outright encourage, but is actually pretty bad:

• Sports.
  
  Yes, sports. What, you haven't noticed how they make people violent? How it correlates with crime? You've never noticed the way High School cliques develop around sports teams, forming the basis for in-group behavior and bullying? Or how a school's star athletes can get away with murder (and in the case of pro athletes, sometime literally get away with it)? Rather than encourage great thinkers and people of accomplishment as role models, we teach kids to idolize professional baseball and basketball stars - people who at their best still contribute no more to society than Paris Hilton.
  
  Contrary to the message of every sports movie ever made, there's very little redeeming quality to be found in organized sports, and what value there is decreases exponentially with levels of competitiveness.
• Homework.
  
  Despite the conventional wisdom, homework has a lot of negatives and no positives to speak of.
• Religion.
  
  I'm not going to expand on that one - because if you'll ever agree with me on that one, you don't need to read the argument here. And conversely, if you don't agree with me, no amount of links is going to convince you otherwise.

Then there's the legitimate threats that we overreact to and in a rather spectacular style, utterly fail to protect against:

• Child Abductions/Molestation.
  
  Remember how someone tried to blow up a plane with his shoe, and now we have to take off our shoes at the airport? And then we went through the same thing with bottles of water. These security practices aren't just annoying: they're completely pointless. Yet we do them anyway, because it gives the appearance of doing something, however ineffective.
  
  Now, if there's one thing in this world that breeds even more irrationality than the threat of terrorism, it's the threat of child molesters. Child molesters, like terrorists, are out there. They're bad guys, they mean harm, and they need to be stopped. Sexual abuse of a child is one of the more truly horrific things imaginable. But it's truly stunning how misplaced the fear of it is, and how we wind up not protecting children from the threat as a result.
  
  I mean holy f.uck - the state of Virginia wants you to call the cops if you see an adult holding hands with a child. If you live down there, I'd advise against helping a young kid cross the street. British Airways bans men from sitting next to children on flights. We live in a society that all but assumes that all men are pedophiles.
  
  Here's the reality of child molestation though. The vast majority of molesters are family members. The vast majority of the rest know the kid in some other capacity (teachers, priests). And child abductions and molestation by strangers is so rare that every single time one happens in this country of 300 million, it makes the national news.
  
  That latter point probably explains why people are so irrationally afraid that their kid is going to be the next JonBenet Ramsey - if we see it on the TV, we think it must happen more often than it does. (As a rule of thumb, if it's on the national nightly news, it's not actually anything we should waste energy worrying about.)
  
  Here's the thing though: if we want to help make children safe from strangers that would abduct them off the street, "don't talk to strangers" is really bad advice. We actually make the world less safe for them by preaching it.

Now, at the same time that we irrationally fear for the children, there's another group of "children" that we show a completely irrational fear of. Consequently, we place restrictions on them that (surprise!) wind up doing more harm than good. That's right, I'm talking about:

• Teenagers
  
  We live in a world where increasingly, teenagers are legally prohibited from doing much of anything. Driving is restricted. A group of teenagers hanging out in a town park, minding their own business, will (in my experience) always attract a cop. Shopping malls are increasingly off limits. Freedom of speech for teenagers, not so much.
  
  It shouldn't surprise anyone that the onerous restrictions and prohibitions we subject them to actually cause many of the behaviors we want to limit.

And then, if there's one thing, as a society, that we've decided we need to go above and beyond to protect all children from above all else, no matter what, no matter how much liberty and freedom we have to sacrifice to accomplish it is:

• Porn and "Dirty Words"
  
  It says a curious thing about our culture that the term "adult" can be used as a shorthand for these things, despite the fact that there are any number of other things that separate adults from children in terms of entertainment and activities we enjoy. But these "adult" things are the only ones that need to be kept out of sight of children no matter what.
  
  We can describe gory murders on the 6:00 news, but they can't use the word "f.uck" on TV. Oprah can help a con man convince millions of people that magic is real, but any depiction of sexual congress has to be left to our imagination. (Maybe if I wish hard enough, the FCC will go away?)
  Given that we all but ignore threats to their health like obesity, and care nothing for the mind warping effects of marketing - this stuff must be really, really, really bad to warrant this kind of censorship. The harm that it brings to children must be unimaginable - worse than diabetes, worse than what the violent media we don't censor does, worse than environmental destruction.
  
  Except... there's really not much to back that up. The thing is, in the real world, more than 30% of 14 year old boys are porn users. Many more of both genders have at least seen it. And it stands to reason that if 14 year old boys can get at it, so too could anyone else - girls and younger children just aren't as interested, which also undermines the "harm" argument. Not for a lack of trying, studies have had a difficult time correlating porn use with anything negative (though they have managed to correlate it with a decline in rape).
  
  While the case isn't exactly cut and dry, the idea that some immense harm comes upon children or teenagers who are exposed to porn and the word "f.uck" just doesn't hold up to scrutiny. And on balance, they seem much less harmful than some of the things mentioned above.
• Nudity
  
  (Yeah, this was a very long build up to the main point, which ironically turns out to be pretty short)
  
  Readers of this blog are no doubt familiar with the "What if a child saw?" type objections to public nudity - but usually, people making these objections can't even define the kind of harm they think would come to a child who saw a naked person. Or, if they do, it's usually some vague mumbling about "corruption" and "innocence" - terms which should be a pretty big tip off that we've ventured into fantasy land.
  
  Whereas the impact of sexual media and pornography is at least arguable, simple nudity simply isn't. No one has ever been able to articulate - let alone demonstrate - how a child (or anyone else) is harmed by the site of a woman's bare breasts or a man's penis. The objections and fears are completely unfounded, and have no basis in research or rationality.
  
  There hasn't been much research done into the impact of simply nudity, but what little there is vindicates it as somewhere between harmless and a good thing - Academic Naturist just posted a great roundup of what research there is on the subject.

In fact, most of the "harm" that one can point to with regards to these last two subjects stems from repression rather than exposure. Porn in of itself is probably has no impact. But when porn is the only medium by which people learn about human sexuality and the human body, then problems start to emerge. Fear of sexual expression leads to a deficit of information about safe sex practices and in turn leads to teen pregnancy. Similarly, acting like nudity is shameful and that there's something wrong with the human body sends the message to children that there's something wrong with their body, which leads to body image problems.
So I plead with you, with parents, with society - won't someone please think of the children?



Posted by EJP at 2:04 PM 0 comments Links to this post
Labels: Children, Culture, Nudity and Society