[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0xsJQFIgLg[/youtube]
(Promo for a great program we watched last week on TLC:Let's Talk About Sex)
Imagine this: My older son is 7 (so this is around 2003) and I am trying to motivate him to enjoy reading (something he is struggling with) by hooking it onto something he is innately drawn to (the computer). My plan is to explore the boy scouting magazine Boy's Life online and plumb the near-bottomless depths of its corny-joke repository. My son's reaction to these jokes is so enjoyable—the silliest puns will make him laugh like an ascending piano scale until he's prostrate and breathless. I want to associate this emotional magic with reading.
It's a half an hour before bed and we're nestled together, laptop on our shared laps, as I ask him to tap out the letters of the URL. I fudge the address slightly, though, and instead of directing him to Boyslife.org, I tell him to tap out Boyslife.com.
"Dot C-O-M. Okay, press the 'enter' button."
I am in full-on teacher mode, orchestrating his every move in this exercise, when up onto our screen pops
__a naked woman with breasts as large as her head. __
We both goggle briefly before I move into stabbing, jabbing action. However, every time I hit an 'X' to close out the tab, more boob pop-ups appear instead, until we are faced with a solar system of boobs orbiting around a central boob heliosphere. My son is screaming AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH! and covering his eyes. I'm screaming AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH! while flailing to get rid of the images. With Crouching-Tiger-Hidden-Dragon clarity, we two are enmeshed in a slow-motion world that consists only of seizure-inducing pop-ups and anguished wails.
Finally, I stab the computer's *off *button for an emergency shut-down, take a jagged breath, and turn to explain brightly, "Not that there's anything wrong with the naked body if you're an adult and you're with someone you love and who loves you."
(Upshot: If he ever asks his wife to dress in a neckerchief and khakis on date night, we will all know why...)
I share this tale not for its sheer ridiculousness (that is a bonus) but because that was the day I believe I learned a valuable lesson.
I cannot protect my children from internet porn.
You might disagree. You might suggest vetted programs and apps. You might tell me to police my children's internet use 24/7, limit computer time, and only allow them access to a centrally-located, well-trafficked machine.
It's not that these are bad suggestions, it is just that they're far from infallible. Ultimately, if my sons WANT to find pornography, it is oh, so easy to find. Even if they aren't looking, as my experience illustrates, it can and will find them.
When we home schooled, I framed a great many of our history lessons in this way: there are two kinds of wars, wars fought over land with bodies and weapons, and wars fought over minds and hearts with ideas. Ultimately, wars of weaponry are no match against wars of ideology: whoever owns people's minds and hearts is the person with the real power.
That is the mentality I bring to parenting. I want to win the war of ideas with my children. I want them to internalize certain values and so I carve out spaces where we can come together and I make sure that we talk and talk and talk. Last week, for instance, after I read to them, we talked about sexting.
__"What would you do if someone sent you a picture of themselves naked? Why? __
What could happen if you forwarded this picture to someone else?"
At the end of the day, I would call myself a post-feminist feminist. I don't look at pornography and automatically say to myself, "That is denigrating and anti-woman!" The few times I have watched Cathouse on HBO, however, I've been left worrying seriously about whether or not Air Force Amy feels self-actualized.
Believe it or not, that is the ethos I hope to pass on to my sons. I do not want them to simply reject pornography because it is "bad." I do, however, want them to acknowledge that the two people they might be watching on a computer screen are human beings, and that real-life sexual relationships are complex and work best in an environment that fosters love, dialog, and compromise.
