What's Wrong With This Picture?

Gil Reavil has an article up at National Review Online today about children's exposure to media smut that has me scratching my head.

Apparently, this guy's seven year old daughter is allowed to watch pretty much whatever she wants on television. And even when the author sees her watching something he thinks objectionable, he doesn't do anything about it.

Also, she seems to have carte-blanche to download whatever tunes she wants into her new iBook, the author only noticing what she's doing when she starts spouting some filthy rap lyrics.

Then there is this bit of strangeness:

But what happened next we could not have stopped or avoided through any action of our own. We drove into Manhattan along the West Side Highway, through a commercial district of warehouses and garages. The carriage horses that operate in Central Park are stabled here, and across the highway the military museum installed in the decommissioned aircraft carrier USS Intrepid looms massively on the docks. Also located in this neighborhood, so that it acts like something of a portal to all of New York City, is Larry Flynt's Hustler Club, a sprawling burlesque house situated in a former automobile showroom. Flynt adorns the side of the building with a billboard-sized sign showing a woman, her mouth pursed, blowing on her hand.

Um, "a portal to all of New York City"? I don't drive in NYC, so I'm going to go out on a limb here, but I'm guessing there's more than one way to get about Manhattan if you need to. Surely, if a particular location is that objectionable, you can, you know, go around it.

And there's this piece of deft parental diplomacy:

She had asked about the [Hustler] club before. "What's that?" How to explain a strip joint to your pre-teenage daughter? Keep it simple, my wife always advised, when communicating grown-up concepts to children. "Some men like to watch women dance," I had told her, back when she first asked about it.

Nice going, Big Guy. Did you never read the bit in the Instruction Manual that says just because a kid asks a question about grown-up concepts doesn't mean you have to give an answer? "Never mind - You'll understand when you're older," strikes me as a perfectly appropriate reply for a five or six year old, especially if delivered in a relaxed, dismissive tone that suggests there are other more interesting things to think about. Alternatively, there is no dishonor in lying when the subject gets too sticky: a simple "I don't really know," works wonders as a deflector sometimes.

The author then lets fly:

But we also have left unfulfilled our function as guardians of their cultural environment. The boundaries of their world have been repeatedly breached, many times by people interested in making money and dismissive of all other considerations. All too often, our children are exposed to the loud, frenzied, garish spectacle of adult sexuality. They get their faces rubbed in it. So within the course of one hour of one very ordinary day, I had been treated to a vision of twin seven-year-old fanny slappers, a sex professional taking up neighborhood residence, and groupies begging for oral sex. I didn't like it. It made me mad. What had happened to my family that day was that we had been "culture-whipped," a term that measures the gulf between the expectations of the viewer (or listener) and the content of the media. When you whip your head around, asking "What was that?" not believing your eyes and ears, you've been culture-whipped.

Look, you can complain about being mugged. Mugging is, in and of itself, a bad thing. But your complaint carries a lot less weight if you were mugged while walking down a dark street in a bad neighborhood in the middle of the night with a bunch of cash clinking in your pockets. Here we have an author who is mad about the kind of media exposure his daughter is getting, but who apparently has done next to nothing to limit that exposure because "[he] didn't want to come off as constantly preaching. In present-day America, we learn to swallow many of our responses to modern culture, so as not to appear prudish, vanilla, or outré." Sorry, pal, but it's your job to preach. It's your job to filter out objectionable modern culture, not to swallow your responses. And if your overarching concern is not to look "prudish, vanilla or outré" in front of your kids, well, then you've got some issues of priorities to deal with.

Also, don't be so goddam helpless:

In today's media climate, whether we want it or not, we are inundated, saturated, beaten over the head with sex. Television, our national public commons, has an ever-mounting percentage of explicit sexual content on cable, shading down to the mere leering double entrendre and snickering innuendo of broadcast sitcoms. It's difficult to find a program that doesn't reference sex. It's egregious, it's out of control, it's too much. Media, advertising art, and entertainment constantly shove images at me that I am just not interested in seeing.

Piece of free advice: Try turning the tee vee off.

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin provides more info on our beleagured parent. If you click over to his new book at Amazon, the review copy makes him seem more a bit proactive than does that part of the book excerpted his NRO article.

Let me emphasize again that I am neither a libertarian nor a First Amendment absolutist, but am pretty socially conservative myself. However, while I understand the conservative frustration over the state of the Culture, I have considerable more sympathy for parents who think Something Must Be Done when they recognize that this Something is primarily their responsibility. No, you can't stop everything filtering in, but you can sure stop a lot of it. And you don't need a government-mandated V-chip or Internet-filter to do it. Use your own eyes, ears and hands.

Sound naive? Perhaps, but my seven year old's teacher remarked not long ago about how innocent she was compared to a lot of her classmates. I put this down to the hard work we've done to shield her and her sisters from the dark side. As a result of this work, we, in fact, are not "inundated, saturated, beaten over the head with sex" at the Butcher's House, but are pretty much able to let the Llama-ettes be children.