So it wasn’t a casting call. (There is a big difference between that an an agent interview.)
If the kids didn’t read, then it must have been basically a modeling agency. Acting auditions always involve lines - though the one for our manager just had the kids (who went in five at a time) say “I love Cheerios.” That’s enough for an initial filtering. Certainly no presentations. In fact all I got, even after my daughter was picked, was a few lines about how they were interested and that they’d call us tomorrow.
Now, the place we went that was crooked had a big presentation. I’m not saying the place you went was crooked - crooks don’t reject anyone. My understanding is that modeling agencies have massive go-sees, modeling calls also.
Looks don’t have that much to do with acting either. There are two classes of kids, in NY at least. “Beautiful children” (tall and blonde) and character kids (everyone else.) My daughter was a character kid, and often got cast as the smart one. They are often going for certain looks, which are very different from the normal concepts of beauty.
Valid point. If the kid is told, “Something great happened to you, so grin,” then I’ve no problem with it.
But in the show, although they didn’t show a scene of it happening, they Do have his character describing to his schoolmates the next day what happened in enough detail that there was no ambiguity. So the actor KNEW what had happened to his character.
Wow.
So in your view, then, to be clear, when I said:
Your answer is: “Right! There will come a time when this view is seen as quanit or prudish.”
Yes, that is my answer. There are cultures on Earth right now in which this view would be seen as quaint or prudish. There are countries where children are masturbated to sleep by their parents, where sex play between children is encouraged, and where eating food in front of a member of the opposite gender is considered scandalous. Not everyone has the same taboos.
You know, I first learned about it through a link here, but Og help me if I’m googling “child masturbation customs”! I’ll try some SDMB searches tomorrow when I have some more time, okay? Hopefully the thread wasn’t sucked into the deletion vortex.
Without trying to support the children masturbated by parents as fact, I have to say that the idea is no less surreal than having female patients masturbated by doctors to treat hysteria. Sketchier, yes. More surreal, no.
Wasn’t the children being masturbated/orally stimulated more of an outdated thing? The only thing we just proved was that it isn’t done in Japan, but I vaguely remember hearing that it was done by nursemaids to infants in Victorian times. Can’t find any cites (despite my hardcore and weird googling), but I don’t think it’s so much a question of where as when.
Isn’t that kind of self-deluding, though? I mean, yeah, you can define your first kiss or loss of virginity any way you want. But isn’t that just as delusional as me deciding that my first time was really awkward and not the way I would’ve liked, and didn’t involve an orgasm, so actually I’m a naive young virgin again. Granted, you’re not choosing the sexual experience when you’re raped, but how many of us really chose all the circumstances of our first time?
I’ve been curious about this myself. I saw the premiere at Sundance. The scene in question was shot very carefully. There was nothing expicit, and Dakota wore a body stocking. It was shot outside at night and shrouded by shadows. She talked at the screening and said that the scene was difficult but she wasn’t particularly disturbed about it. I seriously doubt she has any regrets about it. I read recently that no distributor has been willing to pick it up due to its controversial scene.
On the other hand, i didn’t think the film was particularly good, and I think that a distributor would have picked it up if it had been great, despite the controversial nature of the film. IMHO, Bastard out of Carolina was a much better movie covering a very similar storyline.
But The Wonder Years cast was also incredibly close and Danica McKellar and Fred Savage were (and I believe still are to this day) very good friends. While they were “forced” to kiss on screen, if they had just been two friends in high school it might have happened sooner or later anyway.
Depends on how you choose to define “kiss” or “virginity” - I mean, my first kiss was probably given to me on the day I was born by my mother, followed by my father. The first kiss I had that had romantic or lustful intentions happened when I was 15. In between I quite possibly kissed boys on the second grade playground and don’t remember and that stage kiss, which was interesting, but which I’ve never considered a kiss.
As to virginity, that starts getting into definitions of sex and virginity - and sex becomes surprisingly difficult to pin down once you get into it. Medically speaking, a woman who has been raped probably isn’t a virgin, but a woman can shred her hymen with something other than a penis. And a woman can do a hell of a lot of sexual acts that don’t involve intercourse - so is a woman that’s willingly done oral and anal but still hasn’t had vaginal intercourse still a “naive young virgin.”
I’m willing to acknowledge that I may have misremembered that thread as having better cites, or it may have been another thread I read, I don’t know. I think it was the Papua New Guinea people I was thinking of specifically last night, but that wasn’t proven in that thread, and I concede that it may be urban legend. Point to you.
I’ be happy to retract that claim and substitute “there are people who require their young boys to fellate men daily until reaching maturity” if you’d like. The particulars aren’t important, just the point that human beings have a wide range of “normal” sexual behaviors, and our child sex taboos are not universal, geographically or temporally.
Thanks for the information. I think not many people truly understand the amount of sleight of hand that goes into shooting a scene. (Improper pun intended.)
I’d say no, you’re not a virgin after oral/anal, but I’m maybe in the minority for that. Oral alone? We’re in a time where oral is performed way more casual but I don’t think I’d look at someone who had performed oral sex as a virgin. It’s an interesting topic, though.
I’m reminded of Alice Sebold’s memoir, Lucky, where she has to kind of redefine it since she was a virgin when she was raped at age 19. After, she tells herself and others that she didn’t think of herself as a virgin since she didn’t choose sex on her terms, and that she thought she was better off being a virgin when she was raped since she didn’t have as many sexual associations as other people…but then goes on to say that she wondered who she was really kidding.
My first kiss was onstage when I was about 12 or 13, and it wasn’t weird or creepy at all. I was playing Oliver Twist in a high school production of Oliver (the musical version). I had been told by a couple of people in the cast that the girl playing Bet (who was a year or two younger then me) had a crush on me. I was painfully shy around girls at the time, so I never did anything about it. There’s a song called Consider Yourself where the pickpocket gang is singing to Oliver about how he’s one of them now, and during one of the rehearsals she kind of ad-libbed a kiss at the end of the song. It was just a peck, but the whole ‘gang’ ooohed and whistled like teenagers will, and the director loved it, and he kept it in the show.
Obviously every experience is different, and everyone may not remember a first stage kiss as fondly as I remember mine, but I would imagine that a lot of kids have real first kisses that aren’t all that great either.
I’d say virginity is just too hard to define to have others define it for someone. Do lesbians stay virgins all their lives? Gay guys? What if girls break their hymens with tampons, horsebackriding, or never had them to begin with? Are midwestern kids sneaking something past their god by doing ‘everything but(t)’?
You know, I first learned about it through a link here, but Og help me if I’m googling “child masturbation customs”! I’ll try some SDMB searches tomorrow when I have some more time, okay? Hopefully the thread wasn’t sucked into the deletion vortex.