Saturday, January 26, 2013

Should We Blame It on Porn?

Is porn to blame?

Is it to blame for this, reported by Allison Pearson in the London Telegraph:

A friend’s daughter recently started at a highly regarded boarding school. When her mother asked how she was enjoying the mixed-sex environment, the girl said quietly: “You have to give the boys oral sex or they get cross.” Reeling with shock, the mum protested that her darling daughter did not have to do anything of the sort. “Oh yes you do,” replied the girl. “And you have to shave down there or the boys don’t like it.”

The daughter is 14 years old.

Pornography is the young generation’s sex education. We have been hearing from educators that it is essential for children to learn about sex, to explore their sexuality and to experience the full enjoyment that comes with it.

The result: fourteen year old girls are being coerced into offering oral sex.

Surely, the easy availability of pornography is not a good thing. Learning about sex from porn is not a good thing. Trying to mimic what one sees in porn because one has seen it in porn is not a good thing. Sexting pornographic images of oneself is not a good thing, either.

Then again, nothing in porn obliges girls to offer oral sex? Nothing about porn obliges girls to engage in anal sex?

So, we need to address the more important issue: why do these girls feel obliged to go along.

One reason is fairly clear: these children are largely unsupervised. Or else, their parents have a highly permissive attitude toward adolescent sexuality.

When you read the paragraph I quoted you were surely thinking what I was thinking: Did this 14 year old’s mother pull her out of the school?

Since nothing in the article suggests that she did, I will assume that she did not. Since Pearson recommends that parents be more vigilant and protective toward their children, it seems clear that this mother, and the girl’s father, have not been doing their job.

Her daughter is confiding something that is clearly embarrassing. To me, she seems to be asking for help. By allowing her to stay in school, her mother is not only refusing to help, she is condoning what is happening.

I am not familiar with the intricacies of British mores or libel law, but why did Pearson fail to name the school? What if other girls have been coerced into performing oral sex and are not telling their mothers. Don’t the parents have a right to know? Shouldn’t the school administration have to answer for what is happening to the children in their charge?

And then, consider that this mother told her daughter that she did not “have to do anything of the sort.”

Apparently, the message did not get through, because her darling daughter replied that, Yes, she did.

Not to quibble too much, but don’t you think that the mother should have told her daughter categorically that she should not be doing it? Telling her that she did not have to do it is like telling her that she might reasonably choose to do it.

Sometimes children need a more firm set of rules and stricter guidance.

True, today’s parents need to be especially protective of their children. Yet, how many parents still command their children’s respect? How many are sufficiently confident in their judgment to set down clear rules? How many are afraid that they are going to make their children unpopular and sexually repressed? How many can still exercise moral authority?

We, as a culture, have been teaching children to be independent, autonomous and to be rebellious. Children are constantly told not to heed the advice of their superannuated parental units.

Why are we surprised to see that these same children have no way to defend themselves against the siren song of their peer culture?

As for the idea of protection, the only kind of protection that our culture recommends is: a condom. In the past fathers have been charged with the role of protecting their families. Now, no one is allowed to define men as protectors of breadwinners. Thus, condoms notwithstanding, children are not being protected.

And then there’s this: girls today are brought up to believe that they can and should do anything that a boy can do, reality be damned. The American government has just decided, as a matter of policy, that the military should not distinguish between men and women. Even if women cannot pass the tests, they will be sent into combat anyway.

We know that boys very rarely say No to an opportunity for “free love,” so why should girls, who are told to act like boys, feel that they should be the ones who are charged with saying No?

Wouldn't that represent gender discrimination, a throwback to the days when girls were supposed to be virgins on their wedding night?

Many feminists are horrified by the proliferation of pornography, but  these same feminists have been insisting that women should be doing anything that a man can do, and that women enjoy sex just as much as men .

In the feminist manual girls do not need protection; they can defend themselves. They are supposed to be developing as independent and autonomous persons, unfettered by repressive patriarchal authority.

To be fair, Pearson explains that  some “liberal” parents are not quite as horrified as are she and her friend:

Mainstream media has made porn-inspired sex seem compulsory for girls at ever younger ages. “So what?” says the liberal parent who doesn’t think it’s cool to challenge their child’s lifestyle choices, and may secretly envy them. 

If enough liberal parents grant their children permission to have sex at age 14 this will create a cultural norm that is very difficult for other children to resist.

9 comments:

DeNihilst said...

Stuart up til about 5 years ago, in Canada, the age of consent WAS 14. We had one prominent gay MP extolling the virtues of walking on the beach with his 14 year old lover. Ah but saner minds have prevailed. Now the consent age is 16, unless the male is within one year of the females age.

To me most of the baby boomers raised their kids as they perceived their life journey. Fighting the man, free sex, more freedom but less responsibility.

Unfortunately, the chickens are starting to come home to roost. About the only positive I see in this scenario, is that parents like my wife and myself, who imbued a sense of responsibility and hard work, watch with quiet glee, as our kids become the successful ones at school and now university, and soon the world.

Oh yeah one last point, have your kids learn spanish or one of the main Chines dialects, as those cultures still value hard work, responsibility and respect for their elders. They will be in the drivers seat in another generstion!

David Foster said...

What is the likelihood that a girl whose first experience of sexuality is of this type will *ever* be able to truly enjoy sex? "You have to GIVE the BOYS oral sex or they get cross"....defines sex as something women do for men...not far from the (supposed) Victorian attitude of "Men have these bestial desires that women have to satisfy. Just lie back and think of England."

Stuart Schneiderman said...

I agree with you. That really is the problem. In the name of ensuring that these children have good sex lives, the culture is going to make it increasingly difficult for them to find real joy in sex.

Anonymous said...

I think this story and the previous Rittelmeyer/Yale story show the exact same thing. Young women are being fed a load of lies in thinking that they are the same sexually as young men.

In Rittelmeyer's essay, she wrote that all college students saw hooking up as practice for marriage later on in life. No, that's how young women may deluded themselves into seeing it, but not young men.

Now, we have this 14 year old girl who can't see a distinction between her individual existence and her role to pleasure boys sexually. What a tragedy!

The problem lies with the supposedly unassailable conclusion that telling young girls not to have sex too early or too often ruins them later by making them "uptight" about sex. The truth is that these girls want and need to be protected by their parents and society at large from having sex too early with too many boys.

It seems logical and obvious that the best sex for both men and women is when the woman feels safe and protected, and the men have had to work to prove themselves as a protector of that woman. The problem is that we are so far away from this culturally that I wonder if we can ever return to this point.

n.n said...

Why is this considered a tragedy?

We have largely normalized a woman's right to commit premeditated murder of her children, and for nothing more than preserving wealth and welfare.

We have largely normalized homosexual relationships, while still discriminating against multiple partners, and interspecies relationships.

We have largely normalized involuntary exploitation (i.e. redistributive change).

We have largely normalized denigration of individual dignity (e.g. "selective" action).

It is not at all a surprise that moral degeneracy and evolutionary dysfunction would progress together.

We recognize a selective history, science, and reality. The secular faith is unprincipled and corrupt. It is motivated by dreams of material, physical, and ego gratification.

To be fair, this is progressive degeneracy, which follows a cycle with a period of around 100 to 200 years. It is exacerbated through dissociation of risk through circumstance or policy.

Anonymous said...

Bizarre news, outrageous but hard to know how to judge the reality of it, outside of newspaper shock news.

Why indeed does a 14yo submit and confess so willingly to her mom, and seems just as likely it is teen rebellion, saying something outrageous to get attention, and a mother who chronically underreacts, needing escalation until her mom responses by pulling her out of a school she hates? Who can say?

British boarding school certainly has horror stories of bullying, thinking from C.S. Lewis's fiction, or Lord of the Flies bullying.

Blaming access to porn might be wrong-headed, but it more crazy to me to blame feminists values for supposely advocating 14 year olds girls submit to bizarre peer pressure from boys. Feminism if anything would teach the exact opposite!

It doesn't say ANYTHING about the existence of a father, so I'm equally willing to say absent or disinterested fathers perhaps leads to certain kinds of acting out, including earlier submission to sexual pressure?

sestamibi said...

Stuart, Google "rainbow party" sometime. Things are even far worse than you describe.

Anonymous said...

ok a bit late on this post but I just came across this - I can't help but feel this is somewhat toned: don't blame porn, blame young girls and their parents for not being accountable for it.

what about blaming the parenting of young MEN also in the above, everyone is accountable. women are not the default repository of ethical/moral behaviour/responsiblity. both males and females should be equally responsible. seriously, in this day and age to throw it all on the women and leaving the unspoken 'boys will be boys' implication by not addressing how they are parented also... you've just gone full circle with the same problem.

Stuart Schneiderman said...

Thank you for the comment. I do agree that boys watch too much porn. I have occasionally said so on the blog.

I agree with you that boys are not being very well brought up, at home or in schools. I have often said so on the blog.

I also believe that women are in charge of their bodies and that it is easier to persuade them to start respecting themselves than it would be to persuade high school boys to turn down offers of free love.