So the Supreme Court struck down the California law prohibiting the sale of violent video games to minors because it's an issue of free speech. I'm not a hater of video games (although I do think they should perhaps be used in more moderation than they currently are, like many other things in life) but let's change around the subjects for a moment and imagine, if you would, a substitution of "sexually-oriented" for "violent."
Never happen. Because while it's okay to expose children to violence in the name of free speech, it's definitely not okay to teach them about sex in the name of them not dying of STDs or producing millions of babies for which they are ill-prepared and unwilling to care. Because sex is evil. Because sex is something that nice people don't talk about, and if they do it, it's only under duress.
I'm not in a good mood. Hence, I haven't been writing blog posts as diligently as I otherwise might. Well, that and the fact that little of interest has been going on, plus I'm kind of tied up with things unrelated to sex or blogs. I like this week's FFF challenge though, so at some point I'll make time for that. And I do actually have a post in the works, but I haven't had the energy to finish it yet.
I included the first two paragraphs so I wouldn't be doing nothing but writing an, "I can't write right now," post. I included the third paragraph so I wouldn't be doing nothing but writing an, "I hate politics and society," post. This paragraph, I included to tell you about the preceding three. I'd include a fifth paragraph which was all sexy, but... well, read paragraph three for explanation about the missing fifth paragraph. I wrote the preceding sentence to re-engineer the purpose of the third paragraph, and in doing so I managed to change this paragraph, which meant that I somehow changed a sentence I hadn't even written yet. I'm way down the rabbit hole on this one.
3 comments:
Well stated, I agree 100%.
I was discussing the issue with a friend of mine and asked him him the same question. Why violence, but not sex. His answer, while a bit simplistic, made sense.
"Kids," he said, "won't go out and buy a bazooka to blow up the neighborhood, but they can have sex."
The point being that violent fantasy games are much less likely to lead to direct action, while sexual material is quick and easy to put in to practice.
We do a lot of things under the "protect the children" banner when what we should really be doing is something about all the idiot parents who expect the govt to raise their kids.
Can we have a "Save the Kids, Neuter the Parents" campaign?
A good point. I would respond (not to you, but to someone who had this point of view with whom I was arguing) that, given the shoddy state of gun control in this country, a kid may not be able to go out and buy a bazooka, but he or she certainly can get Daddy's pistol from the dresser. Or the hunting rifle. Or the AK-47 that the Second Amendment says it's perfectly legal to have, for recreational/militia purposes of course. Or, failing all that, he or she can still be violent in smaller ways, learning that violence is an acceptable response in our society, until the time when he or she can buy a gun, or drive a car, or just get involved in bar brawls. I don't believe that video games are to blame for things like this; the culture of acceptable violence is to blame. But if one believes that kids might be imprinted by seeing sex, then they can just as easily be imprinted by seeing violence.
And what if they can have sex. I think my rebuttal to that would probably be that I don't have a problem with kids having sex as much as I have a problem with kids having unsafe sex. Getting sex ed from video games and movies is likely to seriously harm a child. But as you say, it's the parents' responsibility, not to say, "Sex doesn't exist," until the unavoidable happens, but to educate their children, even if they don't happen to agree with me that children having sex is no bad thing as long as they do it safely. And I don't necessarily mean just with protection; I'm talking about general safety, like everything we let children do. You don't let your baby cross the street by him/herself, and you don't let your child go off and have unprotected and anonymous sex. But eventually the kid's going to have to cross the street, and simply teaching him/her to fear cars isn't enough.
Okay, rant done; I wasn't ranting at you, just responding to your points, which are quite good.
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