What's really at stake in the scare over kids and cyberporn isn't the forcible corruption of presexual minds with insidious electronic filth. It's the specter of childhood sexual curiosity unfettered by parental controls.
Sex, after all, is the siren call that pulls children out of the family and into the world, the serpent in our domestic garden. Parents anticipate the loss and try to forestall - or even deny - it as long as possible. They often envision sex as an external agent, insinuating its sinister tentacles through unguarded cracks in the family's defenses, rather than as a drive rising up within children themselves, the pull of impending maturity.
So, also, do many parents view the Internet. As mysterious and threatening as their children's burgeoning sexuality, the Net snakes into the home over telephone lines and lures children into all kinds of shadowy activities and relationships their parents don't understand. The technological generation gap exacerbates adults' frantic belief that they can't control what kids are doing online and fosters a reliance on authorities to regulate the Net. Parents assume a less central role in a child's life as his or her sexuality develops, a specter of pending obsolescence that mirrors the ominous predictions that off-line Americans hear about their fate in an increasingly Wired society.
