Will Britain's kid's play "rape me"?
13 10 08 - 05:41 "The pornification of the internet is complete." Declared Rachel Johnson, writing for the Sunday Times on October 5.link
She was expressing her alarm at how pervasive pornography has become and how as-good-as impossible it is to protect children from viewing hard core porn if they have regular internet access.
Johnson:
Okay, I allow that this kind of stuff is a matter of choice for over18s, and between consenting adults. What concerns me is that these are open-access sites, which children of all ages can view. (It’s thought that up to 90% of children have viewed pornography online, and the average age for a first-time view is 11.) So if you combine adolescent hormones and the teenage rage for exhibi-tionism (it’s a fact that nothing happens to a teenager until it’s up on their Face-Book or MySpace page) with the fact that boys are hardwired to take risks and thrill-seek, you have – in my view – the makings of a total disaster.
In America, the National Institutes of Health is studying the long-term effects of porn on young adults. And – surprise – it reports that porn messes up relationships and perverts attitudes to sex. Well, it would, if you were turned on in your formative years by images of women as sex objects gagging for extreme sex.
John Carr, a member of the Family Online Safety Institute, tells me that children frequently have to be taken into care after being exposed to pornography. He knows of a nine-year-old boy who started acting out porno scenarios in the playground. “His idea of sex was a foursome, with everyone switching partners every five minutes,” he told me.
One thing few people appreciate is how quickly attitudes, standards and social mores can change and become accepted as normality. This is a factor in the apparent "generation gap" between the childhood of our parents and grandparents compared to now. It is not only technology that has changed so much, or scientific discoveries about the world - a lot of what past generations would have found disturbingly immoral and socially distructive is now commonplace. For an idea of where the pornification process may lead, we can consider the present situation in South Africa.
The commission said it had identified a number of games pupils played in response to the violence, including one in which they pretended to rape each other. "This game demonstrates the extent and level ... brutalisation of the youth has reached, and how endemic sexual violence has become in South Africa," it said.
The report said that a fifth of all sexual assaults on young people occurred at school. A survey of 1,227 female students who were victims of sexual assault found that nearly 9% of them had been attacked by teachers.
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Sex is marketed as a consumer product and as a method to sell consumer products even to the youngest children.
Take the "Bratz" dolls for example:
The idea for a book about porn culture came to Kevin Scott the day his daughter decided she absolutely had to have a Bratz-doll pony. For months, the 5-year-old had begged him for a Bratz doll—clad in spike heels, fishnets and miniskirt.
In "The Porning of America" (Beacon), which he has written with colleague Carmine Sarracino, a professor of American literature, the duo argue that, through Bratz dolls and beyond, the influence of porn on mainstream culture is affecting our self perceptions and behavior—in everything from fashion to body image to how we conceptualize our sexuality.
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Porn can be seen as a product to control people - just as Noam Chomsky recently described consumerism as doing. Chomsky was interviewed by Der Spiegel newspaper on his views about the credit crunch and financial chaos.
Chomsky: The debt burden of private households is enormous. But I would not hold the individual responsible. This consumerism is based on the fact that we are a society dominated by business interests. There is massive propaganda for everyone to consume. Consumption is good for profits and consumption is good for the political establishment.
SPIEGEL: How does it benefit politicians when the populace drives a lot, eats a lot and goes shopping a lot?
Chomsky: Consumption distracts people. You cannot control your own population by force, but it can be distracted by consumption. The business press has been quite explicit about this goal.
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There are surely few more distracting things than sex, and untold fortunes can be made by exploiting human flesh in this way. As our ideas of normality are warped and the values of the past are forgotten, suggesting that this is a trend we must reverse leaves you open to scoffing liberal remarks alluding to "right- wing knee jerk reactions" and "reactionary prudishness". Presumably no one would not yet say this to objections about the playground "rape me" game, but it's only a matter of time.
Effectively, this behaviour is a product of the inner character of people living society. To insist that they should be forced to conform to dogmatically imposed codes of conduct does not change their inner nature. The pornification genie may never return to the bottle. Only a population with a culture that rejects commercialism, and holds virtue higher than financial status could live apart from the degradations of the hard porn avalanche. Such people simply have a subconscious sense of propriety that draws a line without the need for laws or censorship - although it may include them. It is essential for such people to extricate themselves from the sewer and find their own space. That is why parallelism is the solution.
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