Adult Thoughts
On
Stormy Waters
This page does not contain what
the media like to call adult material
(actually meaning adolescent)
but it is not for the timorous
either. The language is not what one might use at a church meeting but
neither is it so called strong (actually meaning obscene)
Perhaps you came here from the picture at the
end of Elastic and Other Probabilities
and wished she had turned round ?
Sorry but you are in the wrong place, go to
a tabloid newspaper instead. When I look at such newspapers, I often say
to myself:
When are these people going to grow up? Maybe that's
because I have a sexual disability and cannot join in the good clean
fun they claim it to be. However I recognise hypocrisy when I see it
Earlier this year (March 2000) I was watching
Any
Questions on BBC1. One of the panellists was from Channel 5 and she
was challenged on why her channel showed pornography. If I did,
said she, I would be in prison. If you turn over now you will see Sex
and Shopping, that's not pornography . I did switch over and saw a
women with over-large bare breasts having them masturbated while someone
filmed. Who was this Channel 5 lady trying to kid? I suppose it was a documentary?
I do not care a jot if people want to produce
and watch such stuff, but for God's sake don't call it Adult. Be
honest, it is simply pornography with the clear intention of giving pleasurable
arousal.
More recently we have have had a newspaper
of dubious history claiming to be in the vanguard of moral probity and
leading a campaign against that most heinous of offenders. The effect (children
carrying banners saying Kill) even worried them I suspect.
Well here is news for everyone in the child
protection industry. It is not possible to run a society where anything
goes (except, apparently, pictures of an erect penis) in the depiction
and discussion of adult sexuality and still protect the innocence of children.
And covering children up (like Victorian table legs) in films and advertising,
while showing adult nudes in great profusion, humping away for all to see,
will have the opposite of the desired effect.
Children have been ill-treated and misused
since at least the time of Abraham and, like Isaac principally within their
own families. About one child a week, I gather, dies at the hands of those
who are responsible for their care. And more recently we hear that two
women a week die at the hands of their partners. The statistics for children
killed by strangers has stayed at around 2 a year for fifty years. This
sounds to me as if the much vaunted institution of the family is not all
that it is claimed to be. Some boarding schools and children's homes were,
until recently, worse. Any reader of autobiographies would know that without
all the recent enquiries. What then should be done?
First: Stop talking about Abuse and
instead talk of cruelty, assault, incest,
rape and murder, as appropriate.
Then take to heart the phrase from the Butler-Schloss
Enquiry: Children are people, not objects of concern. Let
them speak for themselves instead of calling in well meaning Media Aunties.
Especially those who think wearing a split skirt is appropriate for such
an occasion. Finally cool the adult sexual temperature in advertising and
television drama.
The
last would also help with a related problem: the increase in Teenage Pregnancy.
What else could do we do? run a poster campaign suggesting it is cool
to wear a condom? possibly, at least that would be directed at the
boys. Even in the Bible it is the woman
caught
in adultery with no mention of the man involved. But the real answer
to that, as with so many of our modern ills, especially debt, is to teach
from an early age the merits of waiting, patience and making do to
what is appropriate for the time, age and resources. When, years ago, a
teenage lad of my acquaintance had a spontaneous ejaculation in his pants
on his first date, Patrick painted this picture.
The text on the door says:
To
Be Opened In Good Time.
There remains the problem which Modern
Society has never faced. What should adolescents do with their sexuality
while they wait? (What children should do with their embryonic version
is strictly taboo!) The old remedies of cold baths for prevention and severe
punishment even for a wet dream, never mind mild experiment are, happily
defunct, but there is no modern discussion to replace it. Perhaps if the
child protection industry knew a little more of the history, instead
of being surprised when it surfaces, there might be one. Adolescents,
of course, who spend their time trying to forget they were children, soon
reach 20 and try to forget they were teenagers. By the time they have teenagers
of their own, the world has changed so much they cannot help. That is how
it was in the 20th century, there is no sign that things will change less
fast in the 21st. However, the old class/authority system has gone
forever and those who were part of it are now at least 30, so perhaps there
is hope after another 60 years. Maybe by then the media will have grown
up.