I’m sewing, the twins (age 4) are coloring and we’re nestled on the couch, just hanging out. Typical Sunday morning.
PBS’s Word World wrapped up and the kids nixed the next offering.
My choices are very limited now, since I pulled the plug on even “Classic Cable” as of Wednesday.
(It’s actually pretty cool and much less confusing - instead of skimming 150 channels and deciding it’s all crap, I need only look at 10 to figure it out)
But being as how it’s Sunday and early I decide to check out that venerable CBS staple, Sunday Morning, originated by the late, great (and apparently adulterous) Charles Kurault (wasn’t THAT a shocker, when it came out).
Anyway, as I’m refilling my coffee in the kitchen, I hear that red-headed reporter guy giving a teaser about being in Vegas for the caucuses (full report to follow, later in the show). Yes, a hot time was, indeed, had in the old town tonight - to pique viewers’ interest, CBS’s Sunday Morning is showing Girls! Girls! Girls! in various states of undress having relations with metal poles.
Not so far. I didn’t react and the visuals were a bit disjointed, so they may not have known what they were looking at.
Then again, in a day (week, month) they may start asking questions. Any time, any where, in anyone’s company (Og forbid it’s in my Aunt’s presence, she’s faint dead away).
Well, they will. Eventually. About everything. And as someone said “isn’t it better at home than friends” Eventually your kids will get exposed to the idea of strippers, prostitutes, addicts, genocide, fraud, rape, corruption. warfare…and if you think about it, its going to happen fast, by middle school or high school To Kill a Mockingbird, The Diary of Anne Frank, and Go Ask Alice becomes fairly standard reading.
Oh yeah. Fifth and sixth grade were fun times. I mean, I wasn’t totally 100% on the idea of what sex even was. But by the time I read To Kill…I was about 10 or 11, and I definitely knew about rape. And by the next year when I read Go Ask Alice, I knew that sex was often enhanced by the aid of illegal drugs. And that going on the rag when you’re coming down is a very shitty experience.
Makes the pole dancing seem positively dewy by comparison, no?
IIRC, the OP’s kids aren’t even four years old. You can’t let toddlers watch TV in the middle of the day without them being exposed to pole dancers? And if they are and you express your displeasure, you’re uptight? :dubious:
For someone with obviously such a high I.Q., I have noticed that you don’t seem to have a whole lot of “emotional intelligence”. You don’t have kids, right? That would be a good thing.
The ironic thing is, they issued a “get the kiddies out of the room” warning BEFORE the actual report. I almost watched it, just wondering how much farther they’d taken things.
(I was doing a bit of channel switching there - in between the teaser and the report were some interesting bits on David Crosby and a large-scale sand artist)
It’s not that I have any illusions about creating a perfect world for my kids to inhabit - I just think the media has gotten mighty odd. The violence (direct and implied) in ordinary commercials (say, during a football game) blows my mind.
I’m not clear on why a pre-sexual person would find a pole dancer any more sexually alluring than, say, a ballerina. It’s one thing if they’re showing hooting menfolk tucking bills into a g-string and licking nipples, but pole dancing itself is only sexy because we know it’s sexy. It’s only demeaning because we know it’s demeaning. They don’t know that yet. I wouldn’t worry about it too much.
ETA: Oh, but I’m totally with you on the violence thing. Even 2 year olds know it hurts to get run into and fall down.
There was a news story about how some girls pole danced in the subway on a dare, in Manhattan. If this is considered safe enough for kids to watch in real life, why not in a news story?
My reaction to it would not be based on that one instance, but the accumulation of instances in various media that children are exposed to daily. As the mother of three sons, I’ve through the years been amazed at how pervasive the depiction of women as either sex objects or bitches is. Young children pick up on this, for sure, and it’s, IMO, really done a lot to set back the equal rights movement that women of my mother’s generation fought against. I don’t like it, and if that makes me uptight, then I guess my category is “bitch”. So be it.
I’d have to disgree with you on that, that hearing “bitch” and “ho” in such general use is setting back Women’s Lib. Kids judge gender roles and expectations according to what they see around them in daily life, and since actions speak louder than words, I’d say that seeing women lawyers, astronauts, doctors, cops, senators, governors, two Secretaries of State, and a dead-serious candidate for the presidency (have you noticed how not a single person has said something like, “Oh, look! A woman candidate for Prez! How cute!” No, they’re accepting Hillary on her own terms, as a Politician, not as a female first who also happens to be a politician, which for me is a tremendous step for the culture) as something that’s the norm–IOW, no more “Oh, look, it’s a lady doctor!” which I can remember from my childhood–would more than balance out the random cultural misogynism they might encounter.
Vis-a-vis the OP, I’m kinda “meh”, too, mainly because thanks to Bill Clinton, I once had to explain to my school-age children what a “blowjob” was, not to mention precisely why the POTUS was in deep doo-doo with the electorate. Viewing a brief clip of pole dancing seems pretty tame by comparison, frankly.
Wait, pole dancers are bad, but an alcoholic, ex-drug addict singer’s just peachy? What’s next? That fifteen miliseconds of Janet Jackson bare teat during a football game are somehow worse than violent programming? I realize that I don’t have kids, but it seems to me that the consequences of playing with a loaded booby are a lot less than those associated with a loaded gun.
